


Noise Complaint

by SapphicScholar



Series: One Wall Away [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Coming Out, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/F, Masturbation, Next-Door Neighbor AU, Sanvers - Freeform, Slow Burn, but still pretty canon compliant, first time smut, it'll earn its rating soon enough, season 2a rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-05-21 10:00:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 60,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14913278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphicScholar/pseuds/SapphicScholar
Summary: What started out as a cracky/smutty idea about what would happen if Alex and Maggie lived next-door to one another turned into a rewrite of Season 2a in which Sanvers is given time to develop, conversations about alien rights aren't dropped after a hot second, and Roulette and Cadmus don't pop in and out only when it's convenient.Of course, there's also still smut and crack, so if you're here for that...you'll find it!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is totally written through chapter 10 (and the chapters get a bit longer from here), so updates will go up every 2-3 days

“That’s the last of it,” Kara said, dropping a black duffel bag on top of the pile that had accumulated in the living room of Alex’s new apartment. The moving had been going…slowly at best until Kara came back from putting out a fire downtown, swooping in and carrying towering stacks of boxes up the stairs with ease. The boxes and bags all had a distinctly smoky scent to them now, but it was better than being forced to pay for an extra day with the U-Haul from dragging everything up at a human space.

“You’re a lifesaver.” Alex pulled Kara into a one-armed hug, already slipping her phone out of her back pocket to order takeout to repay her.

“And you’re the dummy that picked a walk-up apartment on the fourth floor.”

“Yes,” Alex conceded, dipping her head in acknowledgement. “But it’s got a big balcony,  _and_  I’ve got a sister that can fly.”

“No calling me just because you got drunk and don’t want to do stairs.”

“Oh my god, that was one time, Kara. One time!”

“It’s not like you’ve ever let me forget the first time I ever got drunk and knocked into your wall.”

“Because I had to pay a small fortune to repair the damage done to literal brick by the force of your alien butt!” Even if she’d been mildly horrified at the time, watching as exposed brick crumbled into dust, once she’d gotten over the shock of the repair bill, Alex had learned to laugh about it—and mock Kara for it at any opportunity.

Kara let out a dramatic huff before sinking down onto the couch—one of the only assembled pieces of furniture in the place.

“C’mon, no pouting. I’m buying you dinner for your help.”

“Really?”

“I’ll even make a second stop so you can get both pizza and potstickers if you’ll reassemble the furniture while I’m gone.”

“Double order of potstickers?” Kara held her hand out, waiting until Alex nodded in agreement before shaking on it. “It’ll be done by the time you’re back!”

\---

By the time Alex got back from returning the rental truck and picking up both of their takeout orders, her apartment had started to look almost like someone lived there. The bookshelves, table, and entertainment unit had been put back together, a dresser set up in her bedroom, and her mattress settled onto the reassembled bedframe. Sure, all of her worldly possessions were still packed into cardboard boxes and littered across the apartment, but they felt more manageable now.

While Alex was busy looking around, Kara snagged the bag of potstickers from her hand, settling in on the couch and patting the spot next to her.

“Don’t you want a plate?” Alex wrinkled her nose in mock disgust as Kara began eating straight from the bag.

“Still packed,” Kara managed through a mouthful of food.

“You know, besides the fact that I remembered to label most of the boxes this time, you do have this nifty thing where you can see through the cardboard.”

“Takes too long.”

Alex sighed, grateful that the pizza place had at least given her a stack of napkins.

Over dinner, they chatted about the new neighborhood, and Alex listened as Kara listed out some decorating suggestions that she knew she’d never actually get around to trying. Besides, Kara’s tastes had always been a little brighter than her own, and no amount of her mother’s less-than-subtle comments about how “homey” Kara’s place felt were going to change her interior design choices.

Once they finished eating, Kara forced herself up and off the sofa. “I should probably go—gotta finish up a draft of my article on that new guy running for mayor.”

“Ugh, this the guy who thinks we should ban Supergirl?”

“That’d be the one.” Kara grimaced at the memory of her interview with him. She’d nearly crushed her phone in anger more than once during their conversation.

“And you got this article because…?”

“Because Snapper thinks it’ll ‘challenge you, ponytail!’” Kara answered, doing a rather poor imitation of his gruff voice, but making Alex laugh regardless.

Alex could only imagine the number of drafts that would be returned to Kara with, “TRY AGAIN,” scrawled across them in red pen. “I guess I should let you get to it then, huh?”

“Probably.”

With a hug goodbye and a glance around to check for anyone out who might see her, Kara kicked off from the balcony and soared into the night sky.

\---

After a few late nights spent unpacking her things when she got back from work, Alex finally started to feel like the apartment was  _hers_ , rather than the place where she crashed at night. She’d gotten her books organized on the shelves the way she liked them and managed to get all of her clothing folded in her drawers or hung up in the closet, even if it meant ignoring a few rather wrinkly button-ups that probably could have used a good ironing. What mattered was that it was done.

Of course, instead of getting to enjoy it on Friday night, Alex got the order to assemble Alpha Team to be ready to intervene in a developing situation downtown. As her team loitered in the command center, she watched the live coverage on the monitors, chuckling to herself at the small CatCo logo in the bottom corner of the screen. Despite all the DEO’s best technology, somehow Cat Grant almost always managed to best them when it came to coverage.

Alex watched as the K’hund tossed a car that had been parked on the side of the road into oncoming traffic—Kara’s timely intervention the only thing that kept it from being a complete disaster. Over the comms, Alex listened as Kara yelled at the small clusters of pedestrians still dotting the sidewalks to flee before they got hurt. Her voice was tinged with desperation as she urged them to move faster, and Alex watched as Kara opted to block the fleeing citizens from flying debris instead of taking easy shots at the K’hund.

Alex hated the guilt that she’d seen flashing in Kara’s eyes when the news first broke, haunted as she still was by memories of letting him go once while under the influence of red K, then not being able to find him again after he escaped during Myriad. Apparently he was ready to make his presence known, though, and in a rather public way.

As Kara fought to subdue the K’hund, Alex called out to J’onn. “Are you sure we shouldn’t go down there? Do something?”

J’onn grimaced. “We’re dealing with some pushback from that new division at NCPD. They say small cases dealing with aliens should be left to them.”

“There’s nothing small about him!” Alex gestured at the screen where the beefy alien was taking blow after blow from Supergirl, tearing up bits of sidewalk as the force of the blows forced him backwards without taking him down.

“I’m aware, Agent Danvers,” J’onn sighed, “but there’s only so much we can do when we’re supposed to keep a low profile.” Sensing Alex’s objections, he held up a placating hand. “For now, it’s one alien that Supergirl has defeated before. She’s keeping property damage to a relative minimum, and NCPD has managed to clear the streets and set up traffic blockades. If the situation changes at all, Beta Team is already in position, and your team is ready if anything worse comes around.”

Alex couldn’t pretend to be happy with standing by and letting a bunch of local cops pretend to save the day, but she bit her tongue, trusting her sister to get the job done.

Sure enough, within minutes, Supergirl had the K’hund subdued and took off with him in the direction of the desert base. Alex squinted at one of the monitors, watching as a police officer chased after Kara, waving and yelling after her until Kara was up in the air and on her way back to the DEO.

Once Kara had the alien in containment for the second time, J’onn called her down for a debriefing, asking pointed questions about NCPD’s involvement and how they had handled the situation.

“They were, I don’t know, fine, I guess.” Kara glanced at Alex out of the corner of her eye, trying to gauge her reaction.

“Would you say they prevented you from doing your job in any way?”

“No, no, nothing like that. One or two of them seemed to want to be in the thick of things, but I yelled at them to stay back.”

Alex nodded in agreement. No use in seeing more people getting injured because they had no idea what they were up against. “What about the cop who chased after you?”

“Oh.” Kara rubbed at the back of her neck, her gaze drifting down to the table. “She, uh, she was yelling to ask where I was taking him. Mentioned something about his rights. Wondered when his trial would be.” While Alex was busy grumbling under her breath about people who didn’t get that this K’hund had already attacked multiple times, inflicting large amounts of damage and even causing several casualties, Kara cleared her throat. “She might have also said something about the DEO.”

“Excuse me?”

Kara felt the weight of Alex’s gaze on her, and not for the first time, she wondered how it was that Alex sometimes seemed like the one with laser vision. “Somehow she knew about the DEO.”

“Fuck.”

J’onn rubbed at his forehead, wondering how some ragtag group at the NCPD had already managed to create such a headache for him. “Did the others know?”

“I don’t think so? I don’t really know. None of them said anything. Just her.”

“Alright, well, we’ll keep an eye on the situation.”

Kara nodded, taking off with muttered words about needing to write “yet another draft” of her article for Snapper. J’onn dismissed the few other agents who’d been in the room, looking wholly unsurprised when Alex stood her ground.

“Sir, we can’t just let—”

“I know, Alex,” J’onn sighed, sinking down into a seat and motioning for her to do the same. “But things like this—they aren’t missions where I can send in a team of well-trained agents to take care of a threat. It requires a level of finesse, finding out exactly how much this NCPD officer knows, figuring out whether or not she’s a threat to us or to Supergirl.”

Alex’s head popped up at that. “I’ll do it.”

“What?”

“I’ll find out what she knows.”

“You know that throwing her into a cell and interrogating her for hours isn’t something that facilitates cooperation, correct?”

“I…yes, fine.”

“If you would like to go serve as the liaison between our office of the ‘FBI’ and the NCPD’s Science Division while I’m in Washington this coming week, I will happily arrange a meeting for you.”

“Done.”

“I’m serious about maintaining friendly relations between the two offices.”

“I know, J’onn. But if she’s a threat to Supergirl—”

“Then we will deal with it together.”

Alex begrudgingly agreed, resolving to find out exactly what this woman knew and make sure it didn’t go any further than that. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for all of the kind words on the first chapter! Now on to meeting Maggie....

“Agent Alex Danvers, FBI.” Alex flashed her badge at the NCPD officer stuck on front desk duty.

He barely deigned to look up from the sports section of the newspaper propped up in front of him. “Yes?”

“I have a meeting with Officer”—Alex glanced down at the index card with the scrawled name of the woman Kara had picked out of their virtual lineup of NCPD officers—“Maggie Sawyer.”

“One minute.”

Alex tapped her foot as she waited for him to call her.

“Sawyer? … Yeah, some fed’s here to see you. You want me to send her to you? … Alright.” He looked back up at Alex. “She’ll be here in a minute. You can take a seat.”

Alex glanced over at the rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, opting to stand instead. After a few moments, a small woman strode into the waiting area. With a smile that seemed less than certain on her face, she raised her hand in greeting. “You’re here to see me?”

“Officer Sawyer?”

“ _Detective_ Sawyer, but yes, that would be me.”

“My name is Alex Danvers. I’m an agent with the FBI unit that your division has expressed interest in supporting on the occasional small case.” She held up her badge as a show of good faith, even if it was a faked ID.

“I don’t think that’s quite how we phrased it, but sure, come on back.”

Alex followed behind Maggie, watching the way her hips swayed slightly with every step, drawing her attention—nowhere, absolutely nowhere. She shook her head and sped up to walk at Maggie’s side.

Once they were settled in one of the small meeting rooms, Maggie sank into a chair, steepling her hands on the table in front of her and regarding Alex with a slight tilt to her head. “What can I do for you, Agent Danvers?”

“I figured it would be good to meet after the first extraterrestrial threat in which you and your division”—Alex bit back words like “meddled” or “got in the way” or “talked about things you couldn’t understand”—“intervened.”

“Mm, right. The K’hund.”

“I…yes. Did Supergirl speak to you?”

Alex couldn’t help but notice the way Maggie rolled her eyes at the question, feeling herself bristle in turn. “No. You think I need Supergirl to give me information as basic as the kind of alien we’re dealing with?”

“It’s just, certain things aren’t exactly common knowledge.”

“Most things aren’t common knowledge. But once it’s your job, you learn them.” Maggie said it so matter-of-factly that Alex almost found herself nodding right along with her.

“Some things are classified, though, and there will be situations in which we at the FBI will need to be the ones to call the shots and take point.”

“You mean steal jurisdiction and leave us in the dark.”

Alex ground her teeth together, hearing J’onn’s voice in her head telling her to play nice. “I mean ensure that the situation is handled appropriately.”

“With no oversight or care for the aliens’ rights.”

“Do you have any idea about the K’hund you were dealing with?” Alex scoffed, pushing her hair back from her face. “He’d been imprisoned before. Twice actually. Even if we ignore his prior records, here on Earth he went out on a spree destroying armored vehicles, abetting criminals in stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gold, killing or seriously injuring almost a dozen guards in the process.”

“So there are trial records?” Maggie arched an eyebrow as she held Alex’s gaze, the corner of her mouth curling up slightly as though she were enjoying herself.

“You have a jail cell to hold someone who can crumple a car into a ball of metal with his bare hands?”

Maggie shrugged. “Even if the containment is on you, there are rights that shouldn’t be abridged.”

“I—you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh really? Do I still not know what I’m saying when I look at that fake badge of yours and call your bluff ’cause I can tell you’re DEO from a mile away?”

Alex felt her hands curling into fists. “I can see this was a pointless meeting.”

“What? Mad that someone might not let you get away with running a black ops site in the middle of nowhere?” Maggie yelled after her, but Alex was already through the door and striding back outside.

On the drive to the DEO, Alex called J’onn, grumbling loudly about pain in the ass cops who should learn to stay in their own lanes.

“Alex, please tell me that the working partnership is still intact.”

“It is. I left, but I didn’t yell at her…not really.” She could hear J’onn sigh through the line.

“These orders are coming from high above me. With the President’s new Alien Amnesty Act signed into law, we’re going to see more and more changes.”

“But—”

“Alex, some of them will be good. People like me, like your sister—we might be able to live openly, and even if I'm still not certain about how it will work in practice, it is law now. But that means that things like alien rights will need to be a consideration. The way we’re operating now might no longer work.”

“Okay, fine. Say  _you_  stole from a store. Sure, you should get a trial. But J’onn, these Fort Rozz aliens have intergalactic rap sheets that go on for pages!”

“And a few of them were subjected to an unduly strict justice system and given life sentences for petty crimes that might only have garnered fines and community service here.”

“What about the ones trying to kill my sister, J’onn? I’m supposed to let the cops throw some flimsy handcuffs on them and put them in front of a jury of people they could kill with a single punch and call that justice?”

“It’s—it’s more complicated than that. We are not ceding control completely. But the new law means there will be cooperation. It means being a little more upfront and self-reflective.” A pause. “I’ve not been the most open to these changes, but I’ve been working to understand them. I think Kara might be a step ahead of both of us here. Perhaps it would be wise to listen to her.”

“Maybe.” Alex was anything but convinced.

“Change is coming whether we like it or not. We’ll do well to get out in front of it, set the terms of these partnerships while it’s still in our power to do so.”

Alex hummed in understanding. She’d adapt; she could do that. But ceding any amount of control to Detective Sawyer? That would happen over her dead body.

\---

Alex spent her evening reading through the articles Kara and Cat had been writing about the Alien Amnesty Act and alien rights over the past few months. She remembered listening to Kara rave about having the opportunity to work with Cat “as equals, Alex, can you believe it?” but she had heard so much about the articles while Kara was writing them that she never got around to reading the final drafts, let alone Cat’s pieces.

Begrudgingly, she admitted that they made a few good points. The interviews they had done with aliens from across National City had moved Alex in ways she hadn’t expected. There were children forced into home-schooling because they couldn’t pass as human, and adults forced into manual labor without any protections or insurance, being paid well below the minimum wage because they couldn’t get papers.

Alex thought back to Kara’s early days with them. She’d had trouble controlling her powers at first, and she had spoken in halting sentences with odd inflections on the words, but she’d never struggled to  _look_  human. That was something Alex had always taken for granted. But seeing the portraits featuring silvery skin that shimmered underneath bright flashes or scaled hands that held a child close to a mother’s chest…that wasn’t a possibility Alex had ever considered. She’d seen less-than-human hands curled around weapons pointed at her and her team and her sister; she’d watched distinctly non-human faces contort with rage in the midst of warfare and destruction. But the portraits Cat had organized—well, there was a reason she won as many awards as she did.

Come the end of the night Alex was far from convinced—especially when it came to NCPD’s involvement—but she thought J’onn would be proud of her for trying, and that had to be enough for now.

\---

Two quiet days in a row with J’onn out of town had to be too good to last, and sure enough, on Thursday, a group of three Tormocks, one of whom pinged as a Fort Rozz escapee, laid waste to downtown National City.

Ignoring the call from NCPD, Alex ordered Alpha and Beta teams to mobilize and meet Supergirl downtown to provide backup. A call to Vasquez at the desert base from the van was enough to have a third team meeting them to secure the area and provide aerial reinforcements should they become necessary.

Deep in the fray, Alex cursed as bullets bounced ineffectively off the skin of the Tormocks, shifting as they did to become bulletproof and static or mobile and deadly in turn. Supergirl was holding her own, but there were only so many things she could do when her opponents could alter themselves at will, becoming impervious to her every attack.

Bullets ricocheted off the Tormocks' suddenly solid forms, and Alex found herself ducking and dodging more rebounding attacks from her own team than from the aliens.

The DEO agents confused and frustrated, and Alex watched on in horror as a few of them let their guard down long enough for a Tormock to strike out with an arm that was suddenly sharp as a blade. 

“Man down! We need a med evac,” Alex barked into her earpiece as she watched Jackson, one of the agents from Beta Team, fall, a gash across his face and upper arm, his chest having been saved only by his Kevlar. Dodging attacks, Alex wove her way across the street and grabbed Jackson, dragging him to the relative safety of an alleyway.

“You’re okay,” Alex insisted, putting pressure on the wound and calling again for backup as she watched blood soak through the fabric over his arm at a pace that seemed much too fast to give the man a solid chance at survival. She swallowed back fear, repeating over and over again that he would be okay, even as she radioed in to the med team to let them know that his brachial artery might have been cut and they needed to have blood ready for him stat. 

As soon as Jackson was whisked away into the back of one of the med vans parked a few blocks over, Alex threw herself into the fight with a renewed zeal, rage and frustration pulsing through her veins.

It seemed like a small eternity before a first shot landed, wounding one of the Tormocks while he was in a more vulnerable form, lashing out to try to attack Supergirl.

Alex whipped her head around, looking to see who’d managed to get the shot off, following the bullet’s trajectory back to a dumpster where she found the same damned detective from Monday crouched low, little more than a standard-issue police gun in her hand.

“Get out of here!” Alex hissed, jogging back to the dumpster.

“I’m the first one that got a shot in! I’m staying.”

“This isn’t your mission.”

“Only because you’re all too stubborn to admit you could use help.” Maggie popped up, firing off another round and landing a glancing blow to the same Tormock as before, who seemed to be moving more slowly, his shapeshifting not coming as easily as it once had. “See!”

“Do you even have a vest on for protection?” Alex grumbled before leaning out to fire off a round of her own, cursing under her breath as she caught the thick armor.

“Trick is to start shooting while they’re still armored. The second Supergirl leaves herself open for an attack is when they shift, and that’s when they’re vulnerable, but only for a few seconds.”

Alex watched, noting the exact moment when Supergirl turned her attention away from one of the three aliens. Never one to be bested, Alex sent a volley of bullets in his direction, letting out a satisfied huff as they met their mark, leaving one down—or at least down enough to contain—and two to go.

Maggie looked almost impressed. “Good shot.”

“It’s my job.”

“God, you’re infuriating.”

“And you’re not?”

They were soon distracted by one of the remaining two Tormocks, and Alex called out orders to her teams, breaking down Maggie’s instructions over the comms and getting her best long-range shooters in position, while Supergirl was left with only a small handful of agents who knew where to stand to avoid the line of fire.

By the time they wrestled the third alien into containment in the back of a DEO van, Alex had three wounded agents, including Jackson, who remained in critical condition. With an excuse to that effect, Alex brushed off Maggie and hopped into the back of a van, calling in for updates from all of her teams as they drove back to the downtown branch while the transport van took the Tormocks out to containment in the desert base.

Between check-ins with the wounded agents and more phone calls than she’d ever wanted to make and stacks of paperwork that seemed endless, Alex felt the post-battle adrenaline surge seeping out of her and leaving her exhausted.

After one final call down to the med bay to inquire into Jackson’s status—still critical, though it looked like he would pull through—Alex dragged herself out of the office. The short drive back to her building passed in a haze, and she cursed the lack of an elevator as she dragged her legs up the four flights of stairs to her apartment.

Once she was in the door, Alex kicked off her boots and shucked her jacket, pulling off the rest of her clothes as she made her way to the bathroom and into the shower. It didn’t matter that she’d washed off at the DEO; it never felt like she’d quite left the battle behind until she stood beneath the hot stream of water in her own bathroom in her own apartment, letting the final remnants slip away in the steam. Not that they ever went away entirely. She knew well enough that the nightmares that woke her weren’t random, much like she knew there was more behind the way her thoughts raced and spiraled, keeping her awake on days when she’d come a little too close to losing people, to losing her sister.

That night, though, Alex felt ready to fall into a deep sleep as she sank down on the mattress and pulled the sheets up around her, letting her head nestle into the pillow.

Barely an hour later, she woke with a start, bolting up and scrambling for her gun as she tried to figure out what had pulled her out of such a deep sleep.

A thud against the wall behind her headboard drew her attention.

“ _Fuck_.”

Alex narrowed her eyes at the offending woman’s voice, but it seemed to quiet. Perhaps she hadn't been the culprit after all.

After a few minutes of murmurs from next door that were barely enough to constitute noise, Alex sank back down into the covers, letting herself get comfortable once more.

It was then that she heard the squeaking of a bed frame. Incessant. Grating. A few minutes later it was joined by a woman’s breathy moans— _fuck, oh god, don’t stop_. 

Alex blinked at the clock on her bedside table. 10:49. Possibly early enough that normal people would still be awake. Of course, normal people hadn’t been awake since 4:30 and battling aliens into the early afternoon. Not that her neighbor knew any of that. Because Alex was a good neighbor who didn’t leave any indications about her schedule.

She ground her teeth as the rattle of the bed grew louder, the woman’s demands and moans increasing right along with it. A loud, high-pitched whimper finally rang out, and Alex let out a preemptive sigh of relief.

To Alex's dismay, the process repeated another two times before the noises stopped entirely.

Well, wasn’t he considerate, Alex thought to herself. Then again, maybe it had all been faked. God knows she’d done it a few times. Or, well, more like all the times. But she didn’t need to dwell. Instead she pushed all those questions down with her ever-growing to-do lists and thoughts about calls she had to make, resolving to deal with them all in the future. Maybe.


	3. Chapter 3

“You’re grumpier than usual,” Kara noted, sliding into the chair across from Alex’s desk in her rarely-used office.

Barely glancing up from the stack of paperwork that still needed to be completed after yesterday's mission, Alex grunted. “Didn’t sleep well.”

“Ah, I’m sorry. Worried about Jackson?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, that.” It was certainly part of it. And there was no need to traumatize Kara, who’d already overheard too many of her own friends and coworkers getting it on, with stories about her next-door neighbor’s nighttime adventures.

“I heard he’s doing better today.”

“Mhm, they’ve got him in stable condition. He'll be out on medical leave for a while, but at least he's alive.” Alex rubbed at her face with her hands, trying to wake herself up.

“What do you say to going out to grab some lunch? It looks like you could use some time in the sun.”

“You know we don’t all get powers from the sun, right? Some of us just get skin cancer.”

“Oh hush. It’ll do you good.”

Alex rolled her eyes but followed along anyway as Kara led her down a few blocks to the park. Now that food trucks had officially been sanctioned in National City, the streets around the edge of the park filled up with them at lunchtime every day, and although she didn’t have super senses, Alex could admit that it smelled pretty amazing, even from a whole block away.

While Kara ran to the truck she claimed sold the “best grilled cheese in National City,” Alex meandered down the street, investigating each of the trucks’ offerings. There were tacos that looked tempting and desserts that she thought probably had enough calories to kill her, then some organic place with things like kale smoothies that left her wrinkling her nose in disgust. She finally opted on a truck that sold empanadas almost exclusively with a line that wasn’t quite as absurdly long as some of the others.

As she waited, she glanced around, making note of her surroundings and the people around her—certain habits never quite left her, even when she wasn’t in the office—doing a double-take when she saw a flash of brown hair and an oversized NCPD windbreaker. It couldn’t be… But sure enough, there was Maggie Sawyer, reaching up for a cone at a—Alex squinted—vegan ice cream truck? Sounded even worse than a kale smoothie.

Alex nearly threw herself onto the ground when Maggie turned around, busying her hands with the still-tied laces of her boot and praying the woman didn’t notice her. After a few moments, she peeked up from behind the curtain of hair that had fallen into her face, sighing in relief when she didn’t see the detective again.

To Alex’s continued relief, the rest of lunch was less exciting, and she had to admit that sitting out in the park, chatting with her sister over good food was much better than sitting alone under the fluorescent lights of her lab and swallowing a bland protein bar in a few bites.

The midday break coupled with J’onn’s impending return almost made the afternoon seem bearable, and getting to leave before 7 improved everything, even if Alex knew she was on call through the night and would likely end up back in her lab at some point that weekend.

After a dinner of reheated, two-day-old takeout and an episode of some procedural that had her scoffing about shoddy police work, Alex decided she could reward herself with an early night after her interrupted sleep from the day before.

Only once more, Alex found herself startled awake, this time by what sounded like a bed frame slamming into their shared wall over and over and over again, rattling the plaster behind her head. It was, yet again, accompanied by the woman’s breathy moans and calls for  _faster, harder_  that Alex hoped her neighbor ignored because she really didn’t want to find out how great the structural integrity of the building was.

She wondered if she could call in a noise complaint or maybe just pound back on the wall. And really, was it necessary? They’d done it yesterday. And more than once. Surely that was enough to last for quite some time. It wasn’t like she…well, maybe she was an exception in making it a few years without really feeling the “need” to find some guy for anything, but still. Two days in a row seemed excessive.

When it became three days in a row, Alex was irate. She hated her neighbor for having apparently found himself a girlfriend and hated the girl for being so…vocal about what Alex could only assume was her faked pleasure and hated them both for being so goddam consistent about it.

The phone call that startled her awake for the second time that night a little after 2 in the morning did little to improve her mood, and she found herself throwing on her uniform and racing to the DEO to assess a situation down in the warehouse district where some alien had apparently taken to starting fires for fun.

Alex watched the flames fan higher on the screens in the command center as she waited for Supergirl to arrive. The moment she landed, Alex called out the orders. “Firefighters are standing by to help with the blaze. Delta Team, fall in to provide backup. Supergirl and I will fly in to assess the situation. Put Alpha on standby, but early reports suggest it’s only one hostile, maybe two.”

As members of Delta Team collected their weapons and piled into the van, Alex let Kara pick her up and felt the last remnants of drowsiness fall away in the rush of cool night air against her face. As they neared the warehouse district, the air grew hazy, thick with smoke, and Alex held up an arm to shield her eyes when they dropped lower.

“What’s the situation, Supergirl?” Alex called out over the noise of the wind whipping around them.

“I think there must be traces of lead or something in the old buildings—I can’t see through the walls. But I only hear one voice.”

Alex reported the details over the comms, bracing herself as Kara lowered them down to the back entrance of the warehouse where the hostile currently was. While Alex got herself and her team into position, Kara flew back up, ready to make a surprise appearance through the roof.

Just before Alex could slam her weight into the backdoor, forcing it open, she heard Kara’s voice in the comms. “Alex! Alex!”

“Yes?” She let out an impatient huff. 

“The alien isn’t alone—there are two heartbeats in there.”

Alex nodded to herself. “Alright, well, let’s get the job done. Delta, on my command.” In seconds, they had rushed the building, guns blazing as they surrounded the two bodies. “FBI! On the ground!” It was rarely that easy, but every so often the element of surprise worked well for them.

Of course, this time neither body dropped, and Alex fought to see through the smoke to get a sense of what was going on.

“Stop!” A voice rang out. “Don’t shoot!”

Alex blinked. The voice was familiar, but they definitely hadn’t called NCPD in on this one. “Sawyer?”

“Stand down, Danvers. I’ve got this.”

Alex bristled at the orders, striding forward to assert her role. As she got closer, the alien let loose a fiery blast from her hands, flames swirling around her. In an instant, Supergirl had crashed in through the ceiling, freezing the hostile where she stood.

It was only moments before she melted the ice around her, looking angrier than ever.

“Scorcher, stop!” Maggie yelled, raising her hands, though Alex noted the pained grimace that pinched her features and the patch on her leather jacket that had been thoroughly singed. “You don’t need to do this.”

“I’m the one that needs to stop?” Scorcher let out a bark of incredulous laughter. “Look around you! You’re delusional.”

“They’re only here because of the fires,” Maggie insisted. “The men from earlier—they probably only thought they were helping.”

“And it’s all because of people like you. Alien lovers who think you know what’s best, think the government has any right to know who we are, where we live, what we can do. Why? So they can send out these teams in the middle of the night to come collect us? Experiment on us?” She shook her head, a look of contempt curling up the edges of her mouth. “I won’t be taken.”

And then she was running, a veritable wall of fire erupting behind her and blocking the path of the DEO agents.

“Dammit, Supergirl, go!” Alex yelled into her comms, watching as Kara descended, grappling with Scorcher. Alex froze at the whimpers of pain she could hear coming from Supergirl until suddenly she was flying in fast circles—so fast Alex couldn’t even track the movements. Then Scorcher was on the ground, her flames extinguished, breathing heavily and muttering about “alien pets” as Kara brought her back over to the DEO team.

“What are you doing with her?” Maggie yelled, jogging over to Alex and wincing each time her movements pulled the remnants of her jacket against the burnt patch of skin on her arm.

“Arresting her.” Alex put her hands on her hips and blocked Maggie from getting past.

“I told you they’d come for me!” Scorcher yelled at Maggie as Alex’s team snapped reinforced handcuffs around her wrists and led her outside.

“On what grounds?”

“Seriously? She burnt down three warehouses tonight and attacked federal agents.”

“Two of them were abandoned!”

“It’s still arson! Besides, the third one had people in it—people who are in critical condition or suffering from severe burns.” Alex glanced down at Maggie’s shoulder. “Speaking of…”

“It’s fine.” But the little whimper of pain Maggie let out when she shrugged her shoulders suggested it was anything but.

“Come on, at least let me take you back to get patched up.”

“I can see a doctor on my own.”

“Yeah, well, I  _am_  a doctor.”

Maggie cocked her head to the side.

“Didn’t do my residency, but I know enough to treat a burn—even a nasty one like that.”

After a few minutes of debate and a promise from Alex that they’d be able to negotiate the length of Scorcher’s imprisonment, Maggie relented, traipsing behind Alex as she followed her out.

“I flew here with Supergirl, so we’ll have to get in one of the vans to go back.”

“I have my bike.” Maggie used her good arm to gesture at the Triumph sitting by the side of the warehouse.

After an appraising look, Alex nodded her approval. “Got a Ducati myself.”

“Oh really?”

Alex couldn’t help but notice it was the first time she’d seen Maggie really smile, and her eyes were drawn to the dimples dotting her cheeks. “I, uh, yeah.”

“Nice bikes.”

“Yeah, uh-huh,” Alex nodded, wondering why her mouth wasn’t quite making words as Maggie threw a leg over her bike. “You, um, wait, no. You can’t drive with your arm like that.”

“Well then how do you propose getting back?”

After a moment’s consideration, a smirk pulled up one corner of Alex’s mouth. “You better hold on tight with your good arm.” She held her hand out for the keys.

“Not a chance.”

“I’m an excellent driver.”

“Are you kidding me, Danvers? This bike is my baby.”

“I won’t let anything happen to it. Agent’s honor.”

“Oh good, the honor of an agent with a fake badge and no oversight.”

“It’s that or the back of a van and you leave your bike here overnight and hope the firefighters don’t touch it.”

Maggie let out a deep sigh as she relented, dropping the keys into Alex’s outstretched hand and moving back to let Alex get on the bike in front of her.

Alex turned the keys, smiling at the purr of the clearly well-maintained bike beneath her. When Maggie wound her arms around Alex’s stomach, Alex ignored the rush of heat that seemed to sweep through her whole body. As she drove and Maggie clung to her, Alex shoved down any possible answers to the lingering question about why every turn that had Maggie pressing closer to her left her feeling heady and breathless, an insistent pulse of something she dared not name humming through her veins. If she made a few more turns than were, strictly speaking, necessary, she excused it as confusing Maggie’s sense of direction.

“Not bad for a fed,” Maggie noted once they parked.

Alex took a moment to compose herself before turning back to Maggie. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s, uh, get you patched up.”

Maggie’s gaze hardly lingered on any one thing, eager as she was to take in every detail of an organization that supposedly didn’t exist. “Guess I’ll have to fill out a bunch of forms saying I won’t tell anyone that the DEO is real, huh?”

“Price you pay for entrance.”

Maggie let out a little noise as she took in the central command area. Even stripped down to the overnight skeleton crew, it was impressive.

“How’d you know where to go find the alien?”

“Hmm?” Maggie pulled her attention back to the woman walking one step ahead of her.

“How’d you end up at the warehouse?”

“Oh, Scorcher? Friend called me, told me some people had come banging on her door, saying they knew who she was, what she could do. She panicked, set the whole warehouse she was living in on fire. And then, well, she’s got a bit of a temper, and…I guess you saw the rest.”

“A temper is one thing. That’s whole blocks burned to the ground.” Alex pushed open the door to one of the smaller examining rooms off to the side of the main med bay.

Maggie dipped her head in acknowledgment, hopping up onto the treatment table in what looked like a doctor’s office—or rather, a doctor’s office with much more advanced tech than was in a typical one.

“So what kind of ‘friend’ is this? A CI?”

“No…a friend.”

Alex narrowed her eyes.

“Is it really so hard to believe I could have alien friends that aren’t criminals, Danvers? You and Supergirl are running buddies, aren't you? Just because they don’t all put on a big red cape and swoop around taking pictures with puppies doesn’t mean they don’t have lives.”

“No, I…that’s not what I meant.”

“Fine.”

They fell silent as Alex cleaned the burn, apologizing when Maggie winced in pain. “You know, most of my friends don’t give me third-degree burns.”

“Never said Scorcher was a friend,” Maggie managed between gritted teeth.

“Mm, even you have limits? What’d she call you—alien lover?”

“Just because I don’t discriminate based on home planet…” Maggie rolled her eyes.

Alex looked at her expectantly, waiting for some kind of elaboration.

“It's not that I date aliens exclusively. Though I do tend to prefer them to most humans.”

“Oh.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“I—no, no, that’s fine.”

“On that note, are we almost done?”

“One second.” Alex taped down the last side of the gauze patch, nodding at her handiwork and ignoring the way warmth seemed to travel up from her fingertips as she skimmed over the skin of Maggie’s bare arm. “And done.”

“Great.” Maggie hopped up, giving a forlorn look down at her ruined leather jacket.

“Why the hurry? Got a hot date at”—Alex glanced at the clock—“almost 5 in the morning?”

“Mm, not quite, but I do have a date still waiting for me in bed. And I wouldn’t want to keep a lady waiting.” Maggie winked at Alex as she stuffed her phone and keys into the back pocket of what Alex noted were exceptionally tight jeans. Again.

“I…um…okay.”

“Right.” With a two-fingered wave, Maggie was gone.

It wasn’t until several minutes after she had left that Alex realized she never got her to sign the non-disclosure agreements.

Resigning herself to coming back into the office the next day to fill out all of the paperwork and contact Maggie about signing the forms, Alex grabbed her own jacket and traipsed home, intent on getting at least a few hours of sleep before she had to be back in the office. Even though she’d told Delta Team to take the morning off, she suspected she’d still make it in well before lunch.

She managed to make it nearly to 9 before arguing from next door woke her, though this time she could barely make out the voices. Maybe they’d moved their activities away from the bed for a change.

It was obvious there was a woman yelling. “Again!” was quite clear and repeated several times. She heard something crash to the floor, then the door slammed.

Deciding it wasn’t snooping if they’d been loud enough for her to hear, Alex scurried over to the door and glanced through the peephole, watching as a lithe woman with light brown hair thrown up into a messy bun stormed to the stairwell, still pulling an oversized plaid shirt over her tank top. When her gaze suddenly flashed to Alex’s door, Alex ducked, berating herself for overreacting. It wasn’t as though the woman would know she was there. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to look again. No matter how annoying the relationship was for her and her sleep schedule, she couldn’t imagine the fight was any fun, and it seemed cruel to watch it happen.

When she got back in bed, Alex found she couldn’t fall asleep. The sun seemed too bright, and her thoughts kept circling back to the moments on Maggie’s motorcycle, to the way Maggie’s warm hands had sent her heart racing, making her feel things she hadn’t felt in years.

She couldn’t help the way her mind drifted to the conversation she’d had with Lucy before she left for a new job in Washington…

_“D’you know,” Alex slurred, her lips and tongue feeling clumsy from the copious amounts of whiskey she’d had to drink at the “we survived…again” party after Myriad, “that my last date was Max Lord? And it wasn’t even real?”_

_“No!” Lucy gasped, her mouth dropping open until she raised her glass once more. “That’s been, like, months.”_

_“Not like you’ve dated since James.” Alex glared at Lucy and crossed her arms over her chest._

_“Still more recent than Max. And it’s not like I’ve been a nun.” Lucy snorted at the joke Alex didn’t quite get, resting her head on Alex’s shoulder._

_“Oh. I…yeah, guess I…I don’t have much time.”_

_“Gotta make time for it, Alex. Seize the day! Seize the date!” Lucy chuckled again, her head drooping even more against Alex’s shoulder, shaking Alex with the force of her building laughter. “What about before Max?”_

_“What about it?”_

_“Someone serious?”_

_“No…not really. Second year of grad school? I think.” Things had fallen apart between them right about the same time as everything else in her life fell apart. She found she was least upset about the breakup. She was mainly upset about the fact that it gave her mother yet another thing to complain about._

_“Shit. No. Really?”_

_“No time.”_

_“Danvers…you telling me you haven’t gotten laid in literal_ years _?”_

_“I…it’s not…shut up.”_

_“Eloquent.”_

_“Fuck off.” Alex shrugged her shoulder, sniggering as Lucy nearly lost her balance when her headrest disappeared._

_“C’mon, I find someone.”_

_“No, Luce.”_

_“You’re hot. It’ll be easy. Don’t worry.”_

_“No! I don’t—it’s not—I’m—no.”_

_“Oh?”_

_“It’s not fun,” Alex mumbled, her cheeks warming under the weight of Lucy’s attention. “’S never fun.”_

_Lucy blinked slowly. “Ever?”_

_“I mean, I don’t, whatever, ’s normal. I’m normal.”_

_“No, I’m not—not what I’m saying. Just, I dunno.”_

_Lucy let it drop for a while until they’d sobered up some over large slices of greasy cheese pizza. “Hey, Alex?”_

_Alex had never seen Lucy look tentative before, and it left her on high alert. “Yeah?”_

_“You, uh, you ever think you’re looking for the wrong people?”_

_“What?”_

_“For dating. Or hooking up. Whatever.”_

_“I don’t have time.”_

_“D’you know I’m bi?”_

_Alex’s whole body stiffened at that. “I—I don’t—I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”_

_“Thought you should know. Sometimes…” Lucy trailed off, taking another large bite of pizza before starting again. “Sometimes things felt wrong ’cause they weren’t what I needed then. Or wanted. Whatever. Trying to make things work, you know. Like at the end. With James. Things were over, but I kept pushing even when it felt wrong.”_

_“Okay.” Alex was proud of herself for responding at all when her heart was hammering too hard in her chest, her breath caught in her throat, the room suddenly feeling much too small and warm and suffocating._

_Lucy got Alex into a cab to go home not too long after that, and when she hugged Alex, she whispered, “You got my number, Danvers. You ever wanna talk, ya know?”_

_Alex nodded and forced herself to smile until the cab pulled out into traffic._

_She never did call her about that._

Even though it had been months, fragments of the conversation still floated back to Alex every now and then. When a well-meaning guy asked to buy her a drink. When she noticed how gorgeous some women were. When she let her hand drift between her own legs late at night… She shook her head. It was probably just that three years was getting to be a little long, even for her. That was all.

Forcing herself to focus on the day ahead of her instead, Alex dragged herself out of bed and into the shower, repeating her to-do list like a mantra that could save her from all the thoughts she didn’t have time to deal with right then. Or ever.

\---

After finding Maggie’s number in their files on all the Science Division officers, Alex sent her a text: “Hi Maggie. It’s Alex. Last night I forgot to have you sign those forms. Do you have time today or tomorrow to swing by? I could also come to the precinct.”

Two hours later Alex got back: “Not doing great today. Can I meet you tomorrow? We still have to have that conversation about Scorcher.”

Alex grumbled at the reminder. “Fine. Precinct or here?”

“Meet me at the precinct, then we’ll walk. I’ll buy you a drink for fixing my arm.”

Ignoring the way her stomach fluttered at the offer, Alex typed: “No need. Besides, I’m sure your girlfriend will want to see you after your late night.”

Her phone buzzed almost instantly. “Unlikely.” Then again. “We broke up.”

What did one say to the pain in the ass detective who was also kind of beautiful and brilliant and dimpled and also really gay when she and her girlfriend broke up? Alex tapped out and deleted several versions before sending: “Oh I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, Danvers.” Then, “See you tomorrow at 6.”

As Alex finished up with reports that needed to be submitted before J’onn returned the next morning, her thoughts drifted to the next night’s planned drinks. She wondered if she should have comments planned to avoid the stumbling awkwardness of her text reply. But then again, it probably wouldn’t do to have index cards with things like, “Remember to be nice because she’s sad,” and, “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you’re taking time for yourself,” and, “Let me buy the first round. We’ll toast to singledom!” written on them.

From there her thoughts drifted to what she should wear. Maggie never seemed overly formal, so she figured she could probably get away with jeans, maybe a sweater or a button up. Would wearing one of her own leather jackets make Maggie feel bad about missing her own? No, that was silly. She was sad about the relationship ending, not the singed jacket. Like normal people would be. Just because Alex still mourned the loss of her favorite dark brown leather jacket more than any ex-boyfriend didn’t mean other people felt the same way.

The paperwork ended up taking twice as long as it should have with how distracted Alex was by thoughts of the following day.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some Sanvers plus some Danver sisters to make up for the mess that was the writing of Alex's character in last night's finale. Yikes.

Monday afternoon found Alex pacing around her lab as she waited until the clock hit 5:40 to ensure that she would get to the precinct right on time instead of showing up early and looking eager. Which she most definitely was not. Because she kind of hated Maggie Sawyer. Or at least didn’t care for her. She simply needed her to sign off on forms. And to get this discussion about alien rights and length of imprisonment over with. Because they had to work together. J’onn’s orders. No, President’s orders. Really, it was basically President Marsdin’s fault that they were getting drinks. Her and Maggie’s ex-girlfriend.

The clock finally hit 5:40, and Alex grabbed her bag with the forms in it and strode out of her lab and into the elevator down to the garage. She checked her phone as she waited for it to descend, finding a text from Lucy. “How’s National City without me?”

She wondered what Lucy would think of Maggie but decided it was better not to know. She didn’t really want to think about Lucy’s reactions to the news about drinks.

Instead she sent back: “Clearly a disaster. No one can survive without you. Talk later this week?”

The elevator dinged at the garage level, and Alex stuffed her phone back into her bag before getting onto her bike.

As planned, she arrived right on time, pulling into one of the visitor spots and shaking her hair out from the helmet. It was then that she noticed Maggie waiting outside, her lower lip pulled between her teeth and her gaze raking up and down Alex’s body.

“Nice bike.”

Oh. Of course she was looking at the bike. Not that Alex should feel any surge of crushing disappointment. Why did she care if Maggie looked? Sure, it was nice to be noticed, but most people thought so. “Thanks,” Alex called back, realizing she’d been silent a little too long.

“Mind walking?”

“No, no.” Alex locked up her bike and helmet, then joined Maggie as they strolled down in the opposite direction from where Alex had come. “Where are we going?”

“Uh, actually not where I’d wanted to take you, but P.J.’s isn’t bad. Decent happy hour menu.”

“Oh. I mean, that’s fine. But is there any reason we’re not going to the other place?”

Maggie rubbed at the back of her neck, her lips quirking to one side. “The uh, the girlfriend? Or, I guess, ex-girlfriend now? Yeah, she works there. Figured it’d be best to let things settle first.”

“Right, yeah, of course. I, um, I’m sorry. Again.”

Maggie shrugged. “It’s fine. She was fun and all, but it wasn’t that serious.”

“Yeah…but still.”

Maggie dropped her head in acknowledgment. “Still.”

“So, um, I have the forms for you to sign.”

“Mind if we wait til we’ve got a hard surface in front of us?”

“Oh! Yeah, no, of course! I didn’t mean—I just, you know, don’t want to forget again.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not trying to get out of it.”

“’Cause it’s a bargaining chip for Scorcher?”

Maggie glared at Alex. “Scorcher doesn’t deserve to spend the rest of her life locked up underground because she panicked. I’m not trying to fucking blackmail you.”

“No! No, I—I was trying to make a joke. That’s all.” Alex swallowed heavily wondering where the comparative ease of Saturday night had gone.

They spent the rest of the walk in silence, but as they rounded the corner to the bar, Maggie cleared her throat. “Sorry. I’m not—even if it wasn’t that serious of a relationship, it’s never fun to get dumped. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

“You’re fine, really. But maybe—maybe I could buy the first round?” Alex scooted in on the opposite side of the booth from Maggie.

“What? No. I’m doing this since you fixed up my arm. Which, I didn’t say it before, but thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Alex busied herself with her jacket, slipping it off and setting it in the booth next to her

“No, I mean it, really. You didn’t have to. Not like I was there as a part of your team or anything.”

Alex furrowed her brow as she looked up at Maggie. “You were hurt, though.”

Maggie shook her head at that, a look in her eyes that Alex couldn't identify. “Not always that simple. But thanks.” She grabbed her wallet and stood. “What can I get you?”

“Um, whiskey? Neat.”

“On it.”

Maggie returned a few minutes later with two glasses and a happy hour menu. “In case you want food.”

“Oh god, I’m actually starving. Got tied up in meetings and never did eat my lunch.”

“Sweet potato fries here are pretty good.”

“Mm, noted.” Alex glanced down at the menu, looking through the offerings before deciding on her old stand-by of a burger and fries. “Oh and forms for you.” She pulled the thick folder out from her bag and slid it across the table to Maggie.

“Ya know, I kind of feel like I’m getting the shit end of the stick. I bring you a menu. You give me legal documents.”

Alex’s mouth curled up into a smile. “You’re just lucky I got you the short version.”

Maggie opened her mouth before shutting it again. “Actually, I don’t even want to know.”

Alex busied herself with her phone and walked up to the bar to place a food order while Maggie read through everything, signing and initialing wherever it was needed before finally handing them back over.

“Alright, now Scorcher.”

Alex sighed. “You already admitted she’s not a friend. Why does it matter so much to you?”

“Because everyone deserves a fair chance at justice.”

“And what about justice for all the people she hurt? For all the people she could keep hurting?”

“Danvers, she got scared. And no, she’s not…pleasant. She’s mean and jaded, but you know what? Someone made her that way.” Alex’s gaze drifted from Maggie’s hands and her little emphatic gestures, to the furrow of her brow as she grew increasingly passionate in her defense of Scorcher. She wondered if in another life, Maggie might have been some kind of lawyer—a public defender or something. “She had to grow up being different, and people…people aren’t all that great to you when you’re different.”

Alex’s gaze dropped to the table as she thought back to how awful she’d been to Kara her first few months. She didn’t think it was because Kara was an alien—it was more about the new sister she’d definitely never asked for—but she hadn’t exactly make things easy for Kara at first either.

“Growing up a non-white, non-straight kid in Blue Springs, Nebraska, I may as well have been an alien. Felt like one at least. People didn’t want to listen to me explain that those differences didn’t make me completely unrelatable. And after a while? You kind of learn not to try anymore.”

“You’re not out there burning buildings down.”

“No,” Maggie admitted. “But I’m not exactly showing all my cards either.”

“And what about the others we have locked up in containment? They killed people, sometimes lots of people. They wanted Supergirl dead. They destroyed whole buildings and brought city blocks crumbling down around them.”

“I’m not saying every alien is good. But not all people are either. With people, though, for the most part we try to give them a chance. Aliens…not so much. Sure, Superman and Supergirl fly around and save people and look like the pretty white kids you went to high school with. But some of them don’t have the option to blend in, and we’re not exactly open to them when they don’t.”

Alex sat quietly for a few minutes until their food arrived. She slid the burger toward herself and pushed a large plate of sweet potato fries into the middle of the table. “Figured you could use some food too.”

“Thanks.”

After a few minutes of eating, Alex took a deep breath. “My job—I see the worst of what aliens do. We don’t get calls to come see aliens hiding out or taking care of their kids or working shitty jobs. We get calls to pick up the ones out in downtown National City burning buildings to the ground or grabbing people off the streets or killing bank tellers over money.”

“I get it, I do. It’s easy to get jaded. That—well, that's actually why I had wanted to take you to the other bar.”

“Yeah?”

“Just, I think it might do you some good to meet aliens who aren’t wreaking havoc on the city.”

Alex bit her tongue and didn’t mention that she spent most weekends with one. “Maybe once things blow over with the ex.”

“Maybe then, yeah.”

After talking for a little while longer about Scorcher’s case, their conversation eased into non-work-related topics, and Alex found that when she wasn’t having to defend her profession and her choices at every turn, she actually enjoyed the conversation. Well, she sort of enjoyed the debate too, but it left her feeling slightly unsettled as well. The regular conversation was easier. Or at least it started out easier.

“So what does Agent Alex Danvers do for fun?” Maggie asked before popping a sweet potato fry into her mouth.

“Um…” Alex paused to consider it. “I hang out with my sister?” She hated how pathetic it made her sound the second it left her mouth. “I mean, I, like, um, I work really long hours, so it’s just, I don’t have a ton of time. But sometimes we do game nights with a group of people. And I like to run.”

“Relax, Danvers, it’s not a job interview.” Maggie grinned at Alex from behind her glass. 

“Right. Er, what about you? Besides dating aliens,” she added with a teasing smirk. Two could play at that game.

“Mm, yes, well, as I’m back to being single again, I suppose I should broaden my interests. I don’t know, I like to take my bike out. I love traveling, though I don’t get to do as much of it as I’d like to with work these days. But if I get a long weekend, it’s fun to drive up the coast and go visit a new town or go camping or something.”

“Favorite trip?”

“Oh god, that’s such a hard question.” Maggie mulled it over for a few minutes before answering. “I think I’d have to say Madrid. I went fresh out of college with my girlfriend at the time—Emily. We made it for Pride, and holy shit, Danvers. I mean, I don’t know what your frame of reference is for Pride”—Maggie glanced up at Alex, trying to gauge her reaction but finding none—“but this was massive. Like, bigger than anything I’d ever been to. And, well, obviously the relationship didn’t work out, but I think that might have been us at our happiest.” A wistful smile played at Maggie’s lips, and she sipped at her drink. “No real responsibilities. Fresh out of school but not yet immersed in work or grad school or anything. Just…us. Us and Europe and possibilities, you know?”

“That, uh, that sounds pretty amazing.”

“What about you?”

“Oh. I haven’t actually gotten to travel much. When I was younger we did, but we, uh, after we adopted my sister, we didn’t have much time, and then, well, it doesn’t matter.” Maggie tilted her head to the side, but Alex waved off the unspoken question. “When I was younger I was sure I was going to study abroad. I had dreams of sitting on the beaches in Greece and reading for hours.” She smiled at the memory. “When I got a little older, the dream shifted a bit. I thought Russia would be so cool. I wanted to take one of those incredibly long train rides all the way out into, well, Siberia pretty much. Study science over there…” Alex shook her head; she’d learned long ago not to dwell in the land of what could have been. “Ended up doubling my course loads and taking classes through the summer to finish early. Then the whole M.D./Ph.D. program didn’t really leave me much free time, and I went right from there into, er, training.”

“Wow. That’s all very impressive.”

Alex ducked her head, ignoring the wave of shame she could feel creeping up at memories of how her years in school had really gone. “How, uh, how long have you been in National City?”

“About two years now. Transferred in from Gotham.”

“Wow, that had to have been pretty intense.”

“Yeah,” Maggie admitted, trying not to dwell on some of the more grisly memories. “I miss the friends I had back there, but National City is nice. Pretty good weather. Close to the beach. Close to camping. Can’t complain.”

“Have you done a lot of camping since you’ve been here?”

Maggie shrugged. “Not as much as I should have. You camp?”

“Not really these days, but I grew up in California—little further north, up in Midvale. We used  to go out camping, and my parents would bring the good telescope so that we could watch the stars and planets further away from the light pollution. Not that Midvale was any kind of big city, but I’d never seen darkness like the kind you get in the woods totally removed from any sort of civilization.”

“Yeah…it’s nice though, isn’t it?”

“Can be.”

“I really need to get out. Maybe I’ll use some of that vacation time I’ve been accumulating and finally take a day or two off.”

“Yeah? That’d be fun. If you need a guide or some recommendations, let me know.”

Maggie tilted her head to the side, her eyes sparkling with something that left Alex’s stomach swooping. “You offering to come with?”

“What?” Alex felt her heart catch in her throat and struggled to keep her face normal. “I, um, I more meant, well, I don’t know, I guess maybe it would be nice to get away.”

“Sorry, I didn’t—you totally meant guide as in guide book. Right, yeah, sorry. Misread that. Um, but no, I’d totally appreciate recommendations.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” The pang of disappointment took Alex by surprise, and she forced it back with a sip of water.

Eventually they called it a night, knowing they’d need to be back at work soon enough. On the walk back to the precinct together, Alex realized she’d actually had fun. She wondered if it would translate into their working relationship, or if they’d learn to separate the two, battling it out for cases during the day and laughing over drinks at night.

“You heading home?” Maggie asked, her hands stuffed in her pants pockets, the toe of her boot scuffing at the pavement in the NCDP parking lot.

“I should really take these forms back to the office. Confidential information and all.”

“Ah, true. Well, I guess…til next time?”

“Yeah. See you then.”

\---

“Where were you last night?” Kara asked, plopping down on Alex’s sofa and pulling one of the pillows into her lap.

“Oh, um, I had to take the NDAs over to that NCPD detective to have her sign.”

“And it took all night?”

“Uh, no, we ended up grabbing drinks,” Alex admitted, twisting at the band of her watch.

“That’s great! Are you two getting along now?”

Thing back over their night together, Alex nodded. “Yeah…I think so. I mean, we definitely don’t agree on a lot, but it was…surprisingly fun.”

“I’m so happy for you, Alex! Ever since Lucy left you’ve needed a new friend in town.”

“I mean, I don’t know that I’d call Maggie a friend.”

“But you’re calling her Maggie?” Both of Kara’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s a change from ‘that pain in the butt detective.’”

“I believe I used ass, but yes, I suppose she has been upgraded.”

“Aww look at you two, learning to work together.”

“Shut up,” Alex grumbled, throwing a pillow at Kara, who snagged it from the air.

“Gotta be faster.”

“Or distract you with cookies first.”

“Ooh, do you still have that cookie dough I brought over last week?”

“In the fridge.” Alex motioned to the kitchen, feeling a faint breeze as Kara sped to retrieve it. She returned with a whoosh, a spoonful of dough already in her mouth. “You know, some of us like turning that into cookies every now and again.”

“Too slow.” Kara’s voice was muffled by a mouthful of cookie dough, and Alex rolled her eyes, stealing the tub back and taking it to the kitchen where she turned on the oven and pulled out a baking tray.

“Pick something for us to watch,” Alex called over her shoulder as she searched for the nonstick cooking spray to grease the trays, finally spotting it on one of the higher shelves.

Soon enough, they had cookies in the oven and an episode of Scandal that they could both agree was ridiculous but too addictive to turn off playing on the television.

Several minutes into the episode, Alex’s phone buzzed. She prayed it wasn’t a DEO emergency. When she spotted Maggie’s name above a text message, the corners of her mouth quirked up involuntarily.

“Hey Danvers, I had a great time last night. Seem to remember you mentioning that you play pool…there’s a doubles tournament Thursday night. Any interest in teaming up outside of work?”

“What’s got you all smiley?” Kara reached for Alex’s phone, looking beyond confused when Alex yanked it back, her cheeks flushing a faint pink. “Oh my gosh, is it a date? Who is it? Let me see!”

“No!”

“No, it’s not a date? Or yes, it is a date, but no, I can’t see?”

“Shut up.”

“Alex.” There was a note of teasing warning in Kara’s voice, and Alex looked up in time to see Kara’s hands poised above her stomach.

“Don’t you dare.”

“You leave me no other choice…”

And then Kara had lunged forward, tickling Alex, who managed to keep a tight grip on her phone until one particularly ticklish spot left her rolling off the couch and crashing to the ground, losing her hold on her phone just long enough for Kara to snatch it.

“Who’s the mystery man?” Kara crowed, pulling up the screen, her eyes furrowing as she read the message. “Oh. You dork, are you really hiding your new friend from me?”

Alex swallowed down the surge of panic that clawed at her. “Right, um, yeah.”

“Whatever. Go be weird with your cop friend.”

“Playing pool isn’t weird,” Alex huffed.

A high-pitched beeping sound startled them both, and Alex looked up to find a haze of light gray smoke seeping out of her oven. “Fuck!” In an instant she had yanked the smoke detector down from the ceiling and tossed it into the trash can to keep it quiet while she dealt with the now very burnt cookies. “Ugh, this stupid thing is so sensitive. It goes off all the time.”

“This is why you should eat it as raw dough, Alex.” Kara shook her head at the ruined cookies as she breathed in the smoke before leaning out the window and blowing it into the open air, repeating the process one more time, leaving the kitchen clear again.

“Fine. But if I get salmonella, you’re the one stuck taking care of me.”

“Please, you’d probably still go to work every day.”

Alex couldn’t quite deny it. “Whatever.”

With the last of the raw cookie dough between them, Kara turned Scandal back on, nudging Alex after a few minutes to remind her to reply to Maggie’s text.

Conscious of Kara’s gaze on her, watching as she tried out several variations of the same message, Alex finally hit send. “Sounds great. Send me the details?”

Her phone buzzed a few minutes later with the address of a bar she’d never been to. Before Kara could notice how long it took her to come up with a reply, Alex sent back: “Perfect. Hope you’re good at pool bc I don’t plan on losing.”

“Didn’t think you would.” Alex grinned at that before pocketing her phone for the night.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's chapter is a little shorter, but it made sense to keep it as one coherent scene instead of mixing it in with the next one, which is much longer and will be up on Sunday morning!   
> As always, your comments never fail to make me smile even when it's been a shitty day at work, so thank you for that :)

After a long Wednesday spent in meetings with J’onn after his talks with the head of the NCPD Science Division, Alex was grateful to have the opportunity to lock herself away in her lab for most of the day on Thursday, taking a break only to spar with a few of the younger recruits who’d gotten a bit too cocky in the field and needed to be reminded of how little they still knew.

She’d gotten a few teasing remarks and questions when she brought down real soap and conditioner and a hair dryer into the locker rooms to shower afterward, but a stern glare was enough to send them scampering back to their stations. It certainly wasn’t that she was trying to impress Maggie, but she also didn’t want to show up drenched in sweat or smelling funny.

After setting up a few tests to run overnight in the lab, Alex pulled on her coat and headed down to the garage to make it to the bar on time. 

She swept through the city streets, weaving in and out of the traffic congestion around the most popular bars and restaurants into a slightly smaller but equally loud neighborhood. Drink specials flashed at her from colorful signs and music wafted into the streets from rooftop bars and open windows.

Counting down the numbered blocks until she got to 32nd Street, Alex pulled into the closest parking spot she could find, walking the last few feet to the bar. Not seeing Maggie yet, Alex strolled inside, taking in the surroundings. It was a more eclectic crowd than she was used to these days, but it seemed like a fun enough place. There were a few pool tables on one side of the room and sign up sheets for the 8-ball doubles competition set up at one of the booths.

“Can I interest you in tonight’s tournament?” a small woman with short-cropped hair asked Alex. She held up one of the sheets and a pen.

“Oh, uh, yeah. That’s actually what I’m here for.”

“Wonderful!” She handed over the sheet to Alex, shifting her weight to one foot and smiling up at her. “Now did you already come with a partner, or are you looking?”

Alex’s brow furrowed at the question that seemed to carry more weight than it should have. “Um, I’ve got a friend coming.” She got a smile in return at that.

“Well then, I’ll let you get that information down. But I’ll have to come watch you play.”

With a noncommittal noise in response, Alex focused on getting her name down with Maggie’s. So far there were only six other teams signed up, and Alex looked around her, trying to scout out the competition.

“Danvers!”

Alex spun at the sound of Maggie’s voice, waving eagerly before shoving her hand into her pocket. “Hey. Just signed us up.”

“Oh awesome. So glad you could make it.”

“Yeah—yeah, of course.”

Maggie shrugged. “Wasn’t sure if this was your scene, or…”

For the second time that night, Alex found her mind reeling as she tried to figure out what it was she was being asked without really being asked. She managed a half-smile that seemed to defer Maggie’s attention at the very least. “Drinks? My turn—you bought last time.”

“Uh, beer would be great. Don’t want to lose my focus for the big game.”

Alex chuckled as Maggie mimed shooting a cue. “Hope your form’s better than that when we play.”

For a moment, Maggie froze, finally letting out a self-deprecating laugh. “Didn’t know my form was that bad. Maybe you’ll have to show me how it’s done…”

Alex’s thoughts drifted back to the motorcycle ride. She wondered if Maggie would feel the same pulse of heat with Alex’s arms wrapped around her as Alex had on the bike. Blinking the image away, Alex forced herself to breathe in deeply and look back at Maggie, who was smirking up at her. “Right, um, drinks first. Yeah.”

“Wouldn’t want you to get thirsty, Danvers,” Maggie murmured at Alex’s retreating form.

By the time she got back with two beers, Alex felt in control of her thoughts once more and ready to beat the competition. She hopped up onto the barstool at a high-top opposite Maggie, motioning with her beer to a pair of two guys in the corner. “I think they’re gonna be our real competition.”

“That so?”

Alex nodded, a serious look in her eyes. “I bet the two big ones don’t even play. They’re just wearing leather to seem like they do.”

With a snort of barely contained laughter, Maggie choked on her beer, wincing as it burned at the back of her throat. “I think the leather’s more about the whole bear aesthetic, Danvers.”

“What?”

“I…um, nevermind.” Maggie shook her head, grabbing a napkin to wipe up the drops of beer that had spilled onto the table. “Tell me more about the competition.”

Before Alex could answer, the woman who’d approached Alex earlier was tapping a cheap pool cue on the floor, drawing everyone’s attention over to her. “Thanks to everyone for coming out and signing up! As a reminder, tonight the bar is donating all proceeds to the Center, so drink up and be happy knowing it’s going to a good cause! And if you remembered your donations, we’ve got boxes out for the food and clothing drive the Coalition to End LGBTQ Youth Homelessness is running.”

Alex felt a flash of guilt when Maggie grabbed the bag she’d come in with and dropped it off in the bins. Not that Alex had known there was a drive, but still.

A moment later, the sound of the woman’s voice drew her attention back up to the pool tables.

“We’ve now got our mini tournament bracket pinned up on the board here, so if you’re on a team, make sure you come up and find out who you’re playing first and when!”

“Ready?” Maggie flashed a dimpled smile in Alex’s direction, and Alex couldn’t help but grin back at her.

“To win? Always.”

With a low chuckle, Maggie led the way over to the board. “Well, looks like we’ll be playing those guys you thought wouldn’t be any sort of problem.”

“We got this.”

Maggie’s gaze dropped to the cocky smirk curling up the corner of Alex’s mouth, and it took the voice of one of their competitors introducing himself to draw her attention up again.

“I’m Pat.” He reached a beefy hand out, and Maggie had to tilt her head back to smile at him.

“Andy.” The other man waved at them.

“I’m Maggie, and this is Alex.”

Alex nodded at them.

“Ah, silent partner? Or is this more of a good cop, bad cop kinda deal?” Andy teased.

Maggie chuckled. “First time playing as partners, so we’ll find out.”

“Always a good preview of what’s to come.” Pat winked at Maggie, who ducked her head and ignored the unspoken question in Alex’s eyes.

“Alright!” Maggie’s voice was a little louder than she’d intended it to be, and she cleared her throat before trying again. “Uh, who wants to break?”

“Ladies first.”

“Figures,” Alex muttered under her breath, stopping only when Maggie elbowed her in the ribs with a quiet, “Be nice.”

Alex broke and shot Maggie a confused look when Andy and Pat cheered her on as well.

“It’s a friendly competition, Danvers.”

Alex forced her lips up into a smile; she might not believe in a non-competitive competition, but she supposed she could make an effort at friendly.

Maggie stepped up to take her turn next, sinking the green solid, leaving them with three balls already pocketed.

Alex easily potted another, and Maggie had to pull her back before she fouled by shooting a second time in a row—not that she really thought Andy and Pat would give them a hard time about it. Alex’s spine stiffened and her whole body froze at the warm weight of Maggie’s hand on her lower back.  _Breathe, just breathe_ , was repeated like a silent mantra as she forced herself to stand up and not comment on how the temperature of the room seemed to have risen ten degrees.

Maggie missed her second shot, leaving Pat with an easy angle to sink a striped ball. Andy and Maggie both clapped for him.

“How have you been playing for years with form that bad?” Alex whispered.

Maggie folded her arms over her chest, let out an annoyed huff, and glared at Alex. “I didn’t say I got professional lessons.”

“I’ll show you, alright?”

Alex looked up in time to see Pat sinking his second shot, tying up the game. She forced herself not to smile when Andy missed, and as she grabbed her cue, she reminded Maggie to watch her form.

“Or maybe you just show me when it’s my turn…”

With a shuddering breath, Alex nodded, then sank her shot. “Are you, um, did you…”

“Here.” Maggie grabbed her cue and stepped in front of Alex, motioning to the yellow ball she thought would be her best shot.

“No, this one.” Alex’s hand hovered over Maggie’s hip as she tried to guide her line of vision down to a different shot—further away, but a much easier angle.

“I don’t want to scratch if the cue ball goes in too, though,” Maggie whispered.

“It won’t—not with good form.”

“You know,” Andy drawled, “I think technically the partners bit is supposed to be away from the table, and you play one at a time.”

Alex spun around to yell at him, freezing at the sight of his teasing smile and the weight of Maggie’s hand on her arm, guiding Alex back to her.

“Oh don’t worry.” Pat waved his hand and chuckled, low and gruff. “We’re not gonna interrupt your foreplay.”

Alex could only hope Maggie didn’t hear the undignified squeak she let out, though she thought it was probably a long shot to think Maggie couldn’t feel the way her hands trembled slightly.

“I just, um”—Alex swallowed heavily, her mouth suddenly dry—“we’ll, uh, we line it up. Then when you shoot, you’re gonna pull your arm back.” Alex’s heart hammered in her chest as Maggie’s finger curled around to hold her there for the actual shot. With a silent reminder that she regularly went toe-to-toe with aliens that could snap her like a twig, Alex focused her attention on the pool table, guiding Maggie as she sent the cue ball rolling down the table. She nearly jumped back the second they were done, moving several feet away to watch as it neatly knocked the purple ball into the back pocket without following it in.

Maggie spun around and beamed at Alex with one of those contagious smiles Alex couldn’t help but return in kind.

“Your turn.”

“Right.” Alex managed a tricky shot, only to realize she’d left Maggie with no good options. “Just, uh, just try not to scratch.”

The rest of the competition passed in a daze, and Alex found she didn’t remember the games they won so much as she remembered the random comments Maggie made, her voice barely a whisper and her breath hot against Alex’s ear. She remembered the way Maggie looked bending over the table and the warmth of Maggie’s smile each time she congratulated Alex on a good shot. Most of all, though, she remembered Lucy’s words—those few sentences that had stuck with her for so long, haunting her dreams and nagging at her whenever she let her thoughts stray too far.

It was in the midst of yet another mental replay of Lucy’s suggestion that she was looking for the wrong people that a tiny blonde woman commented on what a cute couple she and Maggie made. “What?” Alex’s voice cracked on the word, and she could feel her cheeks flushing. “I—no—I’m not—”

Maggie stepped in then, her mouth turned up into an easy smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Alex is a”—she glanced over at Alex, who suspected she looked a mess—“friend.”

“Oh.” The woman’s eyes flicked up and down Maggie’s body. “And you? You just visiting too?”

“No.” Maggie shook her head and laughed at a joke Alex knew she must have missed. “Definitely not.”

“Jenna.”

“Maggie.”

“You’re in the final, right?”

Maggie nodded, her gaze darting over to the table where the other semi-final game was wrapping up to determine who she and Alex would play.

“Well, in case you need an incentive to win, what if I promise that I’ll have a drink waiting for you if you do.”

Alex turned away, not needing to hear Maggie’s reply; the flirty smile was answer enough.

During the final, Alex sank her shots as fast as she could, barely caring when she knocked the 8-ball into the pocket, winning them the game and the tournament. She smiled and nodded, not hearing Maggie’s congratulations. She ducked out the moment Jenna came to find Maggie and shrugged off the drink offers, opting to wait until she got home to drink enough whiskey to fall asleep without the night’s memories replaying on a loop.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longer chapter for this Sunday morning! Apologies in advance for any typos - woke up sick and haven't been able to keep my eyes open long enough to do a final read through

The next few weeks passed by in a blur of work and long nights spent dealing with rogue aliens and too many cases that apparently now required the involvement their NCPD “partners” and left Alex dodging Maggie as much as she was dodging bullets and alien attacks.

After the pool tournament Alex sent the briefest of replies to Maggie’s invitation to get drinks again the next week, assuring her that she’d had a good time but was too “swamped with work” to hang out again anytime soon. For once, the aliens of National City seemed to be cooperating, leaving Alex with enough Supergirl news coverage to feel justified in her excuses.

Even her next-door neighbor seemed to be cooperating, or at least rarely home, leaving Alex with night after night of uninterrupted sleep, though her dreams were filled with flashes of dark hair and brown eyes and prominent dimples that left her shaken and panicky each morning. Other than a few rounds with a vacuum and one night with what sounded like Prince’s greatest hits playing on repeat, Alex found her apartment quiet. Of course, when the quiet turned into time alone with her thoughts, she reached for the remote, unwilling to entertain certain questions just yet.

It was three full weeks after the 8-ball tournament that Alex found herself forced to speak with Maggie thanks to confirmation that the increase in attacks around the city had less to do with some random goddess of fate smiling on her and keeping her busy than it did with the now rogue Project Cadmus’s declaration of war against all alien life on Earth. 

J’onn had ordered Alex to go debrief Maggie, who’d been put in charge of the case on the NCPD side. So once more, Alex stood in front of the officer stuck on front desk duty. “I’m here to see Detective Sawyer.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

More thorough than the last one, Alex thought. “I’m here from the FBI about an ongoing case.”

“Hold on.”

Alex crossed her arms and tapped her foot as she waited for him to call down to Maggie. Of course, she probably could have texted Maggie in advance and avoided the whole waiting game. But doing so would have required opening their conversation and seeing the last few texts glaring up at her.

**Maggie (9/22/16, 5:13pm):**  Hey! I know work’s been crazy, but what do you say to a beer tonight?

**Maggie (9/25/16, 10:08am):**  You ok, Danvers?

**Maggie (9/27/16, 3:22pm):** Did I do something? I don’t…you seemed a little…not great after pool and then you bolted.

**Alex (9/27/16, 7:59pm):**  Fine, sorry. Big case – can’t get away.

**Maggie (9/27/16, 8:18pm):** Ah okay. Make sure to take some breaks. Even the big bad Agent Danvers needs sleep

And here she was. Standing in the lobby of the NCPD precinct in the first week of October acting like it was perfectly reasonable to disappear on someone for weeks at a time because said someone was gay and made everything that had once been so easy to shove under the bed—or perhaps in the closet would be the more apt image—too big and noticeable and confusing to stuff in there any longer.

“Danvers! It’s been a hot minute.”

With an inhale that seemed to take more work than usual, Alex managed to lift the corners of her mouth into an approximation of a smile. “Sorry, I, uh, I’m actually here to explain why.” That was a lie. She was there to explain why there had been a spike in cases. She had no desire to get into questions about why the sight of another woman hitting on Maggie had sent a surge of jealousy through her, or why Maggie’s touch left her nerves feeling like they’d caught fire, or why the memory of curling around Maggie’s body haunted her dreams and left her waking more turned on than she’d been since, well, maybe since certain other memories that she’d been pushing down and burying for as long as she could remember.

“Alex?”

“Hmm?”

“I said do you want to come back to my desk?”

“Oh, yeah.” Alex fell in step with Maggie as they walked back through the hallway down to the bullpen and over to where Maggie sat. Alex’s gaze roved over Maggie’s desk. It was organized, though still clear that Maggie was working multiple ongoing cases with files spread out across the surface. There was a small desk calendar with appointments and case details scrawled across it. A navy Gotham PD mug held an array of pens as well as a tiny rainbow flag. Alex was too busy staring at the flag to notice Maggie’s expression as she watched Alex take it all in. Eventually Alex wrenched her attention away from Maggie’s desk. “So yeah, about the case.”

“Which one?”

“Pretty much all of them.”

Maggie tilted her head to the side and pulled out a pen. “Now I’m intrigued.”

“Have you ever heard of Project Cadmus?” Alex watched as Maggie’s features hardened. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I swear to God, Danvers, I can deal with you being”—Maggie glanced around and lowered her voice—“DEO, but I am not teaming up with those—”

“No! No, we’re not asking you to.” Trying to diffuse the tension and wipe the scowl off Maggie’s face, Alex chuckled and rubbed at the back of her neck. “Fun fact: I was actually shipped off to Cadmus once.”

“What?” Maggie’s expression morphed from one of distrust to concern in milliseconds, and Alex felt her heart warm at the clear care.

“I—it’s a long story. Kind of got arrested for treason. You know, the usual, right?” Maggie didn’t join her in laughing. “Got rescued before I could get there and ended up getting some intel on the organization that way. But now…well, now that they’ve officially split from the government and gone rogue, they seem to be doing even worse things.”

“I think they were already doing pretty horrific things,” Maggie grumbled.

“Or, well, yeah, probably. Like I said, I never made it, and even we don’t have access to the kind of stuff that went on there.”

“So glad our taxes paid for that instead of, oh, I don’t know, health care or social welfare or—”

“Maggie?” Maggie’s gaze snapped back to Alex. “I just—we should probably get to the case.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Now that Cadmus is rogue, though, they’ve declared a war against all alien life. We have reason to believe that some of these attacks with alien tech and even some of the attacks by aliens themselves are coming from them.”

“You think they’ve got aliens working for them?”

Alex pursed her lips. “No…I think they’ve got something like the drug that was used on Supergirl last year. I think they don’t care how many human lives are lost if it turns the tide of public opinion against aliens.”

Maggie’s fist clenched around her pen. “So what do we do?”

“I don’t know yet. We’re still gathering intel and trying to find an in of some sort. But we’re on high alert. Your officers should know that there may be human criminals that are armed with weapons much more dangerous than anything they’d normally see. And, well, perhaps even hostile aliens should be inspected for some sort of medical mistreatment before final decisions about punishment or imprisonment are made.”

Maggie lifted her gaze from the notepad where she was scribbling reminders. “You coming around to my way of thinking after all, Danvers?”

Alex folded her arms over her chest and sighed loudly. “Not—I’m just saying, no one deserves to be drugged. And no one deserves to be judged solely on actions from when they weren’t themselves.”

Maggie shrugged. “It’s a start.”

And Alex wanted to complain or point out that Maggie wasn’t simply “winning” this debate, but the soft smile she’d gotten from the detective left all her retorts dying on her lips. “I—yeah.”

“Anything you need me to do?”

“You talked about having some alien friends. Any chance you could keep an ear to the ground, try to find out if they know anything?”

“Will do. And your team will keep ours informed too?”

“We will.”

\---

All good thinks must come to an end, and Alex found that her neighbor’s relative silence reached its close that Friday night. It started with a loud thump against the wall and escalated with a groan that seemed to linger much too long to be real. Bleary-eyed, Alex stumbled out into her living room and fished a pad of paper out of her junk drawer, then patted her hand down across the counter until she found something to write with.

“ _404,_

_It’s after 11. Your girlfriend is loud, and your bed slams into my wall. Some of us work long hours and need sleep. Keep it down._

_-403._ ”

Too tired to care about throwing on a sweatshirt, Alex trudged out into the hallway and slipped the note under her neighbor’s door before giving it a loud knock for good measure. She hurried back into her apartment, smiling at the quiet that had descended.

Only a few moments later, a theatrically loud moan that could have been pulled from When Harry Met Sally echoed into her bedroom, followed by hushing noises and a fit of giggling.

Alex ground her teeth together, feeling every bit the part of the suburban mom being mocked from one room over. She glared at the wall, willing the couple to feel the weight of her anger through the apparently thin layer of drywall. 

Instead, there was more giggling and shushing and whimpers. And then it struck Alex. There were two voices, but neither sounded particularly deep. For half a second, her mind ran straight to the idea that her jackass bro of a neighbor was having a threesome, but then it hit her. Gay. Her next-door neighbor might well be a lesbian. Who was having sex against her wall. Lesbian sex. That she’d been hearing. For months.

Alex got up and poured herself a drink. She put on headphones and waited a full hour before going back near the bedroom with its awful shared wall. 

The next morning she woke up drenched in sweat, her boxers slick, an insistent throbbing between her legs. She ignored it all in favor of a cold shower, a long run, and a second lukewarm shower.

By the time she got out of her second shower, she found a slip of paper under her door.

“ _Dear 403,_

_Sorry for the noise. We’ll try to keep the loud stuff to the daytime hours. I certainly get how annoying it can be. That smoke detector of yours sure was a bitch._

_Best regards,  
404_ ”

The fuming only lasted a few minutes before Alex heard 404’s residents beginning once more, their loud moans—and oh god, those were definitely feminine-sounding moans—filling her apartment. She stuffed a protein bar into her bag and hightailed it out the door and down to the DEO, intent on using her forced exile to be productive at the very least.

Several hours later, Alex was frustrated with the lack of progress. Cadmus seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. The only thing she could say for sure was that the blood of the three aliens they’d picked up attacking the city was tainted with  _something_ —some compound even she didn’t recognize.

Figuring it was worth a shot, Alex sent a text to Maggie: “Got a few aliens in custody that I think you'll want to know about. I know it’s Saturday, but do you have any time to meet? Or any updates from your end?”

Her phone remained stubbornly silent, and Alex found herself sifting through old records once more, discovering little more than confirmation that two of the three aliens they had in containment were peace-loving species that theoretically should have had little motivation to attack.

Finally her phone buzzed with a text back from Maggie. “Sorry, been a little busy. I can come down now if you want.”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

Not too much later, Alex got a call from security to come vouch for Maggie. She jogged down and waved at the guard to let Maggie through.

“Invite a girl over, then don’t even give her name to the guards?” A teasing smile played about Maggie’s mouth, and Alex found her gaze drawn to it.

“I—sorry. Tight security measures, that’s all.”

“What’s up with the case?”

“Nothing,” Alex huffed.

“So I’m here on a Saturday for…nothing?”

“No. It’s not—I mean, it’s maybe something. I confirmed that three of the aliens we’ve brought in from recent attacks had been drugged with something. I don’t recognize the chemical formula at all, but I’m trying to reverse engineer something that could counter its effects.”

“Hey, that’s definitely something, Danvers.”

Alex shrugged, ducking her head. “Not until I actually manage to make something that works.”

“It’s more than we had before.”

“Yeah, well… Point is, two of the three aliens are supposedly quite peaceful. At least that’s what Supergirl says.”

“Mm, and she knows best.” Alex flinched at the bitterness in Maggie’s voice. “Sorry—didn’t get a ton of sleep last night.”

Alex groaned. “You and me both.”

“Tell me you weren’t here all night.”

“No, no. Though I might have slept better if I were.” She shook her head. “I just, too many thoughts. It doesn’t matter.”

“Alex?” Alex hated the way her heart thrilled at the sound of her first name falling from Maggie’s lips. “You’ve seemed a little… Do you want to go grab a bite to eat? Maybe talk a little?”

“I, um…”

“C’mon, my treat.”

“You don’t have to.”

“If I’m right about something, I think I really should.”

After a bit more cajoling, Alex grabbed her coat and traipsed out the door behind Maggie. “Where to?”

“C’mon, we’re going to a diner for some artery-clogging brunch food.”

Alex couldn’t say no to something as tempting as a large stack of buttery pancakes, and the diner was everything she’d hoped for. The décor looked like it had been pulled from the 1950s, and a large OPEN sign hung in the window. They were seated in a tacky retro booth and handed big laminated menus featuring little more than the classics. Almost as soon as they sat down, their waitress brought over mugs of mediocre coffee made better by the promise of free refills.

Once they placed their order, Maggie folded her hands in front of her and gave Alex a warm, almost pitying smile that made Alex feel a little too vulnerable, a little too seen.

“What, um, what’s up?” Alex asked, hating the way her voice was too high-pitched, too shaky, too…not her.

“Things have been weird ever since the pool tournament.”

“I’ve just been busy.”

“Alex.” Maggie’s voice was soft, her eyes crinkling up with what felt too much like understanding. “I, well, maybe I’m making assumptions. So I guess…did I make you uncomfortable?”

“No!” Alex nearly shouted in her rush to correct Maggie. “No, no, not at all. It’s cool—totally cool that you’re, you know…”

“Gay?”

“Right.”

“And you?”

“What about me?” Alex could feel her heart hammering at her chest.

“Why’d you freak out when Jenna thought we were a couple?”

“I didn’t freak out. I just—we’re not, you know? And so it’d be weird if I let people think that we were. Because then I’m basically lying, and that’s wrong.” Alex ran her hands through her hair as she rambled. “And then, you know, then you’d never have gotten drinks with Jenna or a date or whatever, and I’m sure that would have been sad for you.”

“Was it really only about her thinking something about us? Or did it have more to do with her thinking something about you?”

Alex’s shoulders slumped forward. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“I don’t—no, I probably do. But I don’t know that I want to know.”

Maggie reached a hand out across the table, leaving her fingers mere centimeters from Alex’s. “Want to elaborate?”

Alex shook her head.

“Okay.” Maggie eased back into her side of the booth, sipping at her coffee. “Got any fun plans for tonight?”

Alex thought of her neighbor and wondered what she’d be in store for that night. “Not really.”

“That’s fair. Probably deserve a quiet night in after not enough sleep.”

“Yeah, here’s to hoping.” Alex pushed the paper placemat in front of her around, adjusting it until the corners were square with the edge of the table.

Maggie drummed her fingers against the table. “I probably won’t sleep well tonight either.”

“Why’s that? Got a shitty neighbor too?”

Maggie chuckled. “Wouldn’t believe the half of it. But no, just nerves. I, uh, I’m meeting one of Jenna’s friends tomorrow.”

“Oh.” It felt like her vocal chords were too tight, barely eking out sound. “That’s nice. That’s a, uh, big step, right? I guess you two are still a couple then?”

“Yeah. It’s good, you know? I think, I don’t know. Maybe things will be different with her.”

“That—that’s so great, Maggie.” Alex’s hands trembled around her coffee mug.

“Are you okay? You don’t look great.”

Alex’s breathing came in shallow bursts. Suddenly saying what was really going on with her on a personal, individual level seemed so much better than admitting that she didn’t look great because she was irrationally jealous of that stupid little blonde woman who’d done nothing wrong—nothing except being out and proud and willing to take a risk while Alex stood by like a coward. “I think I might be gay.” It was rushed out in one breath, and Alex looked shocked at having said it aloud.

Maggie simply nodded, giving Alex a moment to herself. She accepted the food when it arrived, sliding the stack of pancakes in front of Alex.

Once Alex had moved—even just an inch or two to accommodate the plate—Maggie cleared her throat. “You wanna talk about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know if you want to talk about it?”

“Maybe. But I also don’t know…about the other thing.”

“The gay thing?”

“Yeah, I, uh, that.”

“Well…what made you think it might be true?”

Alex’s fork clattered to the table, clanking against her plate as it fell. She cleared her throat and straightened her place settings once more as she searched for an answer that didn’t circle right back to Maggie and her massive crush on her. “Um, a friend may have suggested it. Several months ago.” 

“And you’re starting to think maybe they were right?”

“I—it’s just—she kind of let it go. I might not have reacted too well to it then.”

“I see. So what happened to make you think of it again?”

“You," Alex answered unthinkingly. "I mean because, you know, you are, and I’m spending time with you. Not because of anything else. And then I think my neighbor’s gay too. And it sort of feels like I’m sort of surrounded by this one thing I’d really rather not think about.” 

“And you don’t know if it’s because lesbians suddenly seem to have clustered around you or if you’re suddenly looking for them?”

Alex blanched. She’d never thought of it that way. “Um, maybe.” 

“So why don’t you want to think about it?” Maggie popped a bite of syrupy French toast into her mouth as she waited for Alex to continue.

“I, I mean, I’m almost 30, you know? And I—what does it mean if it took me 30 years to figure something this basic out?”

“It means that we live in a shitty society where we often don’t let people think there are options until they’re old enough to go through exactly this crisis.”

“But then, maybe I’m just, I don’t know, confused.”

“Hey, no. Alex?” Maggie waited until Alex looked up at her, holding her gaze. “What you’re feeling? Whatever it is. It’s real. You’re real. And figuring out what that confusing mess of feelings means might make you really happy. And you deserve that, okay?”

“But what if…I mean, I’m not supposed to—this wasn’t part of the plan.”

Maggie sipped at her coffee, steam curling up from the mug around her face. “It never really is, is it?” She waved away Alex’s unspoken question. “Look, plans are good and all—to an extent. But they stop being good when they start getting in the way.”

“Maybe.” Alex fidgeted under the intensity of Maggie’s attention. 

“Here’s the thing. Like you said, you’re almost 30. So yeah, you probably get a little bit more of what might be at stake with coming out or what it might mean to be gay, and that can make things a little harder. Change is, well, it can be scary. But”—she held up a hand—“you’re also old enough to know you’ve got people in your corner. It sounds like that friend of yours is there for you. And, I mean, I know we didn’t get off on the best foot, but you’ve got me too, Danvers.” 

“Promise?” Alex hated how scared she sounded, hated the waver to her voice. 

“Promise.”

Alex picked at her pancakes in silence for a while. “How, um, what do I do now? I mean, I’m not even sure.” Though as she said it, she could feel something that she hadn’t quite realized was so unsettled slowly fitting into place, like it was right in a way she’d never realized it could be before. 

Maggie shrugged. “There’s no one right answer, but I bet that friend of yours might be a good person to talk to.”

“Yeah…yeah, maybe.” 

The rest of the lunch was spent talking about lighter topics, and by the time they left Alex felt a little more human again, even if she could feel the exhaustion creeping up on her. 

\---

That evening, Alex pulled up Lucy’s contact information, her thumb hovering over the call button for several long moments before she worked up the courage to press it. 

“Alex?” Lucy’s voice crackled through the speakers. 

“Hey, Lucy.”

“What’s up?”

“Oh, you know, just thought I’d call. See how you were.”

“Um…fine. Same as last weekend. New job continues to be good even if the hours suck.” 

“Ah yeah, so that hasn’t changed, then?”

“Since last weekend? No.” A beat. “Is there something in particular you want to talk about?”

“Um, remember that woman I mentioned? Maggie?”

“Yeah, considering she comes up every time we talk, I don’t think I could really forget.”

Alex felt her cheeks warm. “Er, right. Um, I was, we had lunch today.”

“That’s nice. I see you’re talking to her outside of work again.”

“Yeah…”

“You finally realizing why you’ve been feeling the need to push her away?”

Alex felt herself deflate. “You knew?”

“Oh, Alex,” Lucy sighed. “It’s not bad, okay?”

Alex rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, willing away the stubborn tears that kept clinging to her eyelashes. “I mean, I just, I didn’t know, Luce. I didn’t know, but you did, and she did, and now I don’t know what to do.”

“Well…you could try saying it out loud.”

“Saying what?”

“Alex.” It had a note of the old Director of the DEO authoritative quality to it, and Alex rolled her eyes. 

“Fine, I think I’m—or, no, I just am, I’m gay.” After months of pretending like those words hadn't been niggling at her thoughts and dreams, it felt like an unburdening of sorts. Somewhat anticlimactic, but it was something. 

“There you go.”

“And I really, really like Maggie.”

“Even better. Now you’re on your way to dating.” 

“Not better! She has a girlfriend. A girlfriend whose friends she’s meeting. And they’re gonna all get along and get married and live happily ever after.” A bark of laughter met her. “It’s not funny, Lucy!”

“Oh, sweetie, I know. I know it doesn’t feel funny. But you have to understand that you’ve always been this badass DEO agent who doesn’t have time for relationships or care about them at all, and now you sound like the protagonist in a young adult love story.”

Alex muffled her groan in her pillow. “I feel like a kid again. Or some hormonal teenager.” 

“Horny all the time?”

“Lucy!”

“What?”

“I—that’s not what I meant!”

“You’re telling me that after all those years of trying with the wrong people, you’re not even a little curious about what it might be like to sleep with someone you like and are attracted to?”

Alex’s mind drifted to the feeling of Maggie’s arms curled around her, to the feeling of her chest pressed up against Maggie’s back. She didn’t realize the whimper had been audible until she heard Lucy cackling through the phone. 

“Yeah okay, little Ms. Not-Turned-On, I’m not falling for it.” 

“Shut up.”

“You’re an adult—go get it on!” 

“I’m not just gonna go find some random woman! That would be like using someone!”

“No one said you had to find another person. Jeez.” 

“What?” Alex squeaked. 

“You’ve got fingers. Or a shower. Or a vibrat—”

“Stop!”

“Oh…you don’t have one of them?”

“I…why would I…you know things are a little, um, hard to hide from Kara.”

“Oh my god, Alex. She’s an adult. You’re an adult. Tell her not to go peeking under your bed and treat yourself.”

“I don’t want to go to one of those…those stores,” Alex whispered into the phone.

“You know, there’s this crazy thing called the internet. I know, I know. Sounds implausible, but hear me out.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“And you can too!”

“I hate you. Why do I talk to you?”

“Because you secretly love me.” 

“I should just go to bed.”

“It’s like…7.”

“Yeah, and my neighbor, who I’m pretty sure is actually a lesbian and not a frat bro, is into having really loud sex against our shared wall pretty much every night.”

“Sounds like someone is jealous,” Lucy sing-songed back. 

“Am not!”

“Totally are.”

“Don’t lie to me, Alexandra.”

“Don’t call me Alexandra.” 

“I’m sending you a link. Order yourself something fun. Enjoy being gay and knowing what it’s like to be turned on. And, I don’t know, try to get too blissed out to care about the noise from next door before you do something dumb like filing a noise complaint.”

Lucy was met with silence.

“Alex…tell me you didn’t.”

“It was just a note!”

“Oh my god, you’re  _that_ neighbor. Yeah, okay, you need some kind of release in your life.”

“I—”

“Sparring doesn’t count.”

“I hate you.”

“Good night, Alex.” 

Alex phone buzzed barely a few seconds after the call disconnected with the promised link in a new email. She ignored it. 

After a drink or two (or three), she pulled it up on her computer and began browsing through the options. Half of the jargon was totally incomprehensible, but she figured it probably didn't matter too much. She nearly spit out her sip of wine when a chat box popped up. "Hi there, my name's Carly! Is there anything I can help you find today?”

Alex fumbled with her phone in her rush to text Lucy. “OMG THEY WATCH YOU SHOP???”

“They’re trying to be helpful.” Then, “Glad you’re taking my advice to heart.” 

Ignoring the chat window, Alex threw the first one she saw into her cart, figuring it was around the middle in terms of price. That was fine. It was all fine. She hated everything, but it was totally fine. She typed in her credit card information in a daze and hit order before she could second-guess herself, closing out of the tab and pushing her laptop far away from her.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly shorter chapter with a somewhat NSFW ending 
> 
> Also, heads up, because I shuffled a few things around and added a few longer scenes, this fic is going to be 14 or 15 chapters at the end of it. I'm not updating the number until I've figured out exactly where I'm splitting everything, but just so ya know, we've got a bit more time until the end. See you back here on Thursday for the next update and, as always, thank you so much for the comments! They make my day, even when I'm sick in bed

On Tuesday, Alex received a message from the rental office telling her that she had a package. It took a few moments for the realization of what it was to come crashing down around her, and she spent the entire ride back to her apartment in a panic wondering if it would have arrived in a big pink box with something embarrassing written on top like “SEX TOYS R US.” 

As it turned out, it was a plain brown box with some random company name in the return address. She still shoved it deep into her bag before traipsing up the stairs.

When she got up to her apartment, she stashed it in the corner of her closet, only wandering back when curiosity got the better of her. She opened the box with all the trepidation of an agent diffusing a bomb. Slow, cautious movements. Slipping the pocket knife through the tape as though neat, even lines made it better. She found a second box within the box—this one closer to what she’d feared she might find in the package room. She cut through the second layer of tape with the same methodical precision, finally pulling open the box to find, well, it. 

She hit the power button to see what the big hype was about, frowning when it remained inert. 

Shaking out the box, a power cord fell out followed by a folded up sheet of paper. Instructions. Who knew something so theoretically self-explanatory would come with so many instructions? 

The first step directed her to plug the toy in to let it charge. 

Apparently she needed instructions. 

She found the outlet most out of sight and plugged it in, shutting her bedroom door behind her for good measure. 

As she rooted through the fridge looking for something to eat, her phone rang.

“Danvers,” she answered without looking at the caller ID. 

“Hey, how are you?”

Her heart skipped a beat at the sound of Maggie’s voice. “Oh, uh, good. Good, good, yeah. You?”

“Uh, fine. Wanted to see if you might want to grab a drink. Thought maybe after this weekend you could, I don’t know, use a friend?” 

“Oh. Um, yeah. Yeah, actually, that sounds great.” 

“Perfect. Want to do P.J.’s again? I’m getting ready to leave the precinct in a minute or two.”

“Sure.”

Alex heard a scuffling noise through the phone. “Parking isn’t great there—if you want to leave your bike here, we could walk over together? I’ll wait for you.”

“That’d be great. I’ll head over now.”

When Alex arrived, she found Maggie’s bike already parked on the far side of the precinct lot and tried to chase away all the inappropriate fantasies cluttering her mind before she had to meet Maggie’s gaze.

“Danvers!” Maggie waved at Alex from the sidewalk.

“Hey!” She forced her hand up.

They walked over to the bar together, pulling their jackets tighter around them as the wind whipped up. When they arrived, Alex grabbed a table while Maggie went and ordered their drinks, insisting that the first round was on her. 

Once they’d settled in and gotten the pleasantries out of the way, Maggie nudged Alex’s glass with her own. “How’s everything going?” 

Alex knew better than to try to treat it as a generic “everything.” “It—it’s actually good.”

“Yeah?”

Alex nodded. “Yeah. I, uh, I should probably say thank you.”

“No need, really.”

“No. I mean, you didn’t have to, you know? And I think…I think I’ve let myself get away with pushing some of this down for a really, really long time now. Pretending like things didn’t mean anything, like dating and, uh”—Alex’s gaze dropped to the table, and she tilted her glass enough to watch the contents swirl around—“intimacy weren’t for me, even though…even though sometimes it seemed like they could be, but not with—not with the guys I was seeing.” 

Maggie nodded and reached out a hand, covering Alex’s with her own. Alex knew the touch was meant to be soothing, but god, she could feel her pulse jumping at the touch.

“I guess…I just wanted to say thanks because this—it’s a little less scary with you here.” 

“Always, Alex.” 

Alex let herself have that one moment to turn her hand over and squeeze Maggie’s back. “It feels like things finally make sense. Like  _I_  finally make sense.” 

“Mm, all those ‘damn, I really should have known’ moments hitting you hard?”

“Does everyone get them?” Alex whispered. 

“Oh yeah. Suddenly you realize you weren’t counting down the minutes until your English class started because you really wanted to find out what happened next in  _The Scarlet Letter_ , but because you really wanted to listen to Ms. Jameson talk about it.”

Alex snorted. “I assume with that level of specificity, this is not a random example?”

“Not so much.”

“I think…I might have had a science teacher or two like that.”

“There’s always a teacher, isn’t there?”

“But it was really more my best friend from high school.” Alex was too caught up in memories of Vicki Donahue to notice the sudden clench to Maggie’s jaw, the way her hand trembled on the table until she brought it down into her lap. “I don’t know. I just…I used to love sleeping over at her house, in her bed.” Maggie let out a small noise of understanding. “And then it was…we started fighting over everything. And she had a boyfriend, and I was…well, in retrospect, I was really fucking jealous. And then it all sort of fell apart before I even realized what had happened.”

“That’s never fun. I’m sorry.”

Alex shrugged her shoulders. “It’s fine. Not your fault.”

“Still.”

“Yeah…” 

“But, hey, now you know! And that’s great.”

“No, yeah, it’s good. And I told Lucy.”

“I’m so proud of you, Alex. Telling people—it can be really good. It’s nice not to have to hide.” 

“Yeah.” She sipped at her drink. “I think I want to tell my sister.”

“Yeah? It sounds like you two are close.”

“We are.”

“Well, I’m good for another drink or maybe something to eat for a change when you do. Even when people take it well, it’s nice to have time to decompress afterward with people who kind of get it.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course.”

From there, the conversation drifted into low, murmured talk about cases and updates about TV shows they were watching. Alex got to hear about how meeting Jenna’s friend had gone and tamped down on the jealousy before it could show. Alex in turn told Maggie about a new Italian restaurant that had opened up in between her apartment and the precinct. Kara had been raving about it since making it out for opening night thanks to some press invite James had received. She’d even gotten to write a review for the weekend edition of The Tribune, and Alex had promised her that she would make it out to try the gnocchi that was apparently “to die for.” 

It was nearly 10 by the time they left what was supposed to have been a single drink at happy hour, though Alex couldn’t find it within herself to be annoyed at the disruption to her evening. If it meant spending more time with Maggie, it was a good in her book.

Of course, it didn’t seem quite so good when they stepped outside and found that as the hours had passed inside, a storm had rolled in.

Maggie looked up at Alex, a playful gleam in her eyes. “Ready to run, Danvers?”

“Wait, what?”

“Well I’m not standing out in the rain for a slow stroll back to the precinct.”

Alex rolled her eyes, but she didn’t say no, and soon enough she was sprinting at Maggie’s side, their feet splashing in puddles as rain cascaded down around them, splattering against car windshields and leaving them both soaking wet by the time they made it to their bikes.

And Alex—Alex hated rain, always had. It ruined plans, and thunder made Kara nervous, and she always felt a little claustrophobic when it went on too long. But standing out in it with Maggie, panting and giggling and out of breath, she felt like maybe she could start to learn to love rain. Because Maggie looked a little bit like a drowned rat with her hair plastered to her cheeks, but her smile lit up her whole face, and she was radiant even surrounded by gray skies. 

“Sorry we only got rain and not rainbows,” Maggie chuckled, “but I’m still really, really proud of you.”

Alex smiled and let Maggie pull her into a hug. Her mind screamed out about how perfectly their bodies fit together, and even with rain still falling all around them, Alex felt a deep, desperate heat filling her, flames of desire licking across her skin and burning all the way down to her fingertips. 

Without much conscious thought, Alex’s hand came up to push a strand of Maggie’s hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She sucked her lower lip between her teeth and gulped at the shiver that ran through Maggie’s frame. She found herself leaning in ever so slightly.

“Alex,” Maggie whispered, one hand on Alex's chest and her voice gravelly, thick with something Alex dared not name.

“Maggie.”

“I—I can’t.” Maggie sucked in a ragged breath, pulling herself away. “Jenna—I should—I should go.”

“Fuck.” Alex shook her head, stepping back. The warmth evaporated as quickly as it had spread, and Alex tripped over her feet in her haste to get away from Maggie, to put distance between them. “I—I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry.” She kept muttering it even as she was pulling on her helmet and turning the key in the ignition. She kept repeating it her whole way home.

\---

The hot water of the shower prickled at Alex's skin, not quite washing away the air of regret that hung heavy around her but reminding her of the desire that still pumped through her veins, hot and heady and demanding her attention.

She tried to ignore it anyway, tried to forget its existence as she shifted in her bed, flipping the pillow over again and again until realizing there was no cool side left.

The green light of the vibrator she’d ordered glowed up at her from the corner of her bedroom. It felt accusatory somehow. Like it knew what she wanted to do and why she wanted to do it. But she also needed sleep and knew it wasn't coming without doing something about the insistent throbbing between her legs. So swallowing down a pang of guilt, Alex crept across her room and retrieved it.

She sent up a silent prayer that her neighbor would stay quiet, maybe even be gone for the night; she didn’t need the extra layer of weirdness. The past couple of days had been fairly calm, save for Sunday afternoon, which said neighbor had so helpfully preempted with a note:

“ _403,_

_Heads up: it’s about to get loud, if you catch my drift ;)_

_-404_ ”

Alex had escaped to Kara’s apartment for an impromptu sister’s night, and by the time she got back, all was quiet once more. 

She hoped the quiet lasted. Maybe the neighbor had left. Or moved in with her girlfriend.

Forcing those thoughts out of her mind, Alex tried to focus on nothing more than feeling. On the hum of desire. On the warmth of her own hand against her thigh. She wondered what it would feel like to have another woman touching her thigh. To have her own hands on the thigh of Mag—no, no, just another woman. A random woman. No one specific.

Alex pushed her boyshorts down her legs and let a hand drift higher, her fingertips running through the coarse, trimmed hair between her legs before shifting down. She gasped at how wet she already was, at how good it felt. It had never—never like this.

Her gaze darted to the toy sitting on the bed, and after a moment’s deliberation, she grabbed it. With a deep breath, she hit the small power button, fumbling the toy and letting out an undignified yelp at the sheer volume and power of it. It clattered to the floor with a loud  _thunk_  and continued rumbling against the hardwood.

Alex grabbed it, hitting the first button she saw only to find it rumbling harder in her hands. She cursed every second she had spent mocking the idea of someone who would need an instruction manual. After a hectic minute or two, she managed to cycle through options, finding ones that were distinctly less jackhammer-esque, though even on the less intense settings, she wondered how people got off to something that sounded a bit like revving a lawnmower. Maybe they got used to it. Maybe they were really into the Stacy’s Mom music video growing up. 

Before she threw the vibrator back into the box and stuffed it high on a shelf in her closet never to see the light of day again, Alex decided she might as well try it. After all, she had spent money on the damn thing. 

The first pass over her clit left Alex jumping back at the new sensation, but when she slowed her approach, trailing the tip between her folds and up over the hood of her clit, she felt her whole body shudder. She couldn’t quite help the moan as her hips bucked up into the smooth silicone, chasing the source of her pleasure in a way that felt entirely new. With a scientist’s precision, Alex learned what did and did not work for her, what left her moaning and what sent her hips wriggling back at too much too fast.

The force of her orgasm took Alex by surprise, bursting over her with a ripple of white-hot pleasure that left her crying out. She switched off the vibrator then, falling back into the pillows with a shuddering exhale. Her whole body felt relaxed to a degree she’d never experienced before. She wondered if it had more to do with the toy or the willingness to open herself up to the currents of desire and arousal and attraction she’d been damming up for so many long years. Either way, she fell into a deep sleep soon afterwards, the guilt and waves of self-loathing temporarily abating. Of course, they returned with a vengeance when she woke the next morning, but she’d take the night of rest.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter in anticipation of my 14 hour day at work. Wish me luck! If ya want to help make my day go a little faster, let me know what ya thought in the comments :)
> 
> Also, I've got all the next chapters ready to go, but I'll be traveling for the next week, so they may get posted a little later in the day or I may be delayed in replying to comments, but fear not! We'll have, um, resolution for after the end of this chapter....

Alex avoided Maggie for days on end, and for once, the avoidance seemed mutual. There were no texts asking how she was doing or messages inviting her for drinks or a round of pool. There was only silence. 

On Saturday morning, Alex sent a brief message while walking to Kara’s apartment. “I’m sorry again. Talking to my sister today. Thanks for your help with everything. Sorry.” 

She shoved her phone deep into her bag then and resolved to ignore it until she finished talking to Kara.

Her fist had barely met the wood of Kara’s door before it swung open and Kara pulled her into a tight hug. “Hey!”

Alex felt some of the tension ease out of her frame at the warmth of Kara’s greeting. This was her sister. Her sister who she loved. She could do this. 

“Woah, what’s with the early morning sugar?” Kara asked, gesturing at the half-eaten donut in a Noonan’s bag. 

“Just, um, can I come in?”

“Of course. Is everything okay? Are you in trouble? Are you hurt?”

“I—no, I’m fine. It’s nothing like that.”

“Okay…” Kara looked unconvinced as she tucked a foot under herself and sank down at one end of the couch. “Then what’s up?”

“I”—Alex’s mouth twitched, and she took another bite of the donut—“do you remember Maggie?”

“Um, yeah. NCPD detective. About yea high?” Kara held her hand up maybe four feet from the ground, making Alex snort with laughter. 

“Maybe a couple more inches, but yes.” 

“What about her? Is something wrong?”

“No.”  _Yes, I tried to kiss her because I’m falling so hard for her, only she has a girlfriend, but it sort of seemed like she wanted to kiss me back in the moment, but now we're not talking at all, and I'm kind of panicking because what if I ruined things forever?_  “Remember how I told you she was gay?”

“Uh, yeah.” 

“Well, I, that whole, um”—Alex gestured with her donut, granules of sugar flinging into the air and landing all over the couch—“that thing about her made me think about things about, well, me.” 

“Oh-kay.” Kara motioned for Alex to continue. 

“And I think, I think maybe there was more there than I was letting myself acknowledge. And I think, I think when I really focus on what I was feeling towards her, it wasn’t just friendship. There were…other things.”

“You mean the whole jealousy thing after the pool tournament?”

Alex’s eyes widened as she looked up at Kara. “Jealousy?” It came out as half a question, half a squeak. 

“I mean, it was sort of obvious. You were all smiley about this new friend, then all the sudden you’re ignoring all of her text messages and complaining about some blonde woman. I think even Eliza picked up on it.” 

Alex closed her eyes and tried to breathe in and out in a slow rhythm. “So you’re saying you and mom both knew I was gay before I did?”

“Oh." Kara's eyes widened. "I actually didn’t—that’s not quite where I was going with it.”

“Wait, what?”

“I don’t know, I guess…I thought it was more like the whole thing when you got upset about Vicki spending all that time with her boyfriend in high school, and,  _oh_ …that makes more sense now.”

Alex grimaced and shoved another bite of donut into her mouth. “Alright, so, well, I guess you know now.” 

“Hey, no, sorry, I didn’t mean to steal your thunder. I—I didn’t realize it was leading to something bigger.”

“No, I mean, I guess it’s sort of nice not having it be some big surprise.” 

“I mean, it is big, though. If you want it to be. And I’m really happy you trusted me enough to tell me.” Kara opened her arms and waited as Alex shuffled over to her, letting herself be wrapped in a bear hug. 

“Thanks,” Alex murmured, her voice muffled by Kara's sweater.  

“So…wanna tell me about how you got from jealous to gay?”

Alex sighed loudly, dropping her forehead to Kara’s shoulder. “I don’t know. I just…I started thinking about things—stuff Lucy said before she left and how Maggie made me feel and why I was so upset about her and Jenna getting together. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about things. And then Maggie took me out for food and asked, and for once…for once it felt harder to say no and push things back down than it did to admit to it.”

“I’m really happy you’ve had her to help you through this. I’m sorry…I’m sorry I never noticed or asked or…I don’t even know.”

“Hey, no, it’s okay. You’re okay.” 

Kara shrugged. “I probably could have been better. I just, we’ve had so many cases with Cadmus, and I know you’re working on leads for them, and then there’s all the stuff with Jeremiah, so I sort of assumed that you were all distant because of that. Not because of, well, the other thing.” 

“I mean, I did throw myself into work for a while to try to distract from all the weird confusing emotional bullshit.”

“You mean a crush?” A teasing smile curled up the corners of Kara’s mouth.

“Shut up.”

“Oh my god, am I finally going to get to tease you about a big crush?” 

“Please don’t.”

“Alex and Maggie, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S—”

“Kara, please.” Alex dropped her head into her hands and groaned.

“What’s wrong?”

“She has a girlfriend.”

“Oh, still?”

“Yeah, still.”

“I’m sorry.”

Alex’s mouth twisted to one side, and her brow furrowed. 

“What’s wrong?”

“I tried to kiss her,” Alex blurted out.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, exactly. Oh.” 

“I take it she did not kiss you back.”

“No. I mean, it sort of—no, it doesn’t matter. She has a girlfriend, then I ran out on her yelling apologies.” 

“Okay.” Kara stretched out the word into multiple syllables as she thought it over. “Okay, well, she might have a crush on you too. Maybe she thought you weren’t an option and that’s why she started dating Jenna.”

“Oh she definitely thought I wasn’t an option, considering I basically yelled that I wasn’t gay to a whole bar that, in retrospect, was totally a gay bar.” Alex grabbed one of the throw pillows from Kara’s couch and muffled a loud groan in it. “And now she’s dating Jenna and totally happy with her, and I’m so stupid.” 

“No! No, Alex, you are definitely not stupid. You…you have a crush. And sometimes those make people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.” 

“Like when you gave James the last potsticker at game night or flew all the way to New York to get Cat the specific brand of tea she wanted?”

Kara pursed her lips. “You know, I’m trying to be nice to you here.” 

“Shh, let me be a big sister and tease you.”

“You’re the worst,” Kara mumbled, her voice muffled by Alex’s sleeve as she was pulled into a tight hug.

“Can’t hear you!” Alex taunted, laughing as Kara wriggled her way out of Alex’s grip. 

“Can’t hear me over what? Your big crush on Maggie Sawyer?”

“Shut up.”

“So big you can see it from space—and I’d know! I've been there!”

Alex huffed and crossed her arms. “Not like it’s ever gonna turn into something.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Well…what happened after the almost kiss?”

“I told you, I apologized, then drove off.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Oh my god, Alex, have you not reached out at all?”

“Er, I texted her another apology on my way over here.”

“Did she respond?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked.”

“Alex!” Alex cringed and covered her ears at the volume, while Kara bounded across the room and whipped Alex’s phone out of her bag, displaying an impressive degree of self-control by not peeking at the screen before handing it over.

Alex peered down, finding a message waiting from Maggie. “It’s fine. Hope everything goes well with Kara. Let me know if you need to talk afterwards.” 

“That’s not so bad!” Kara announced, hovering over Alex’s shoulder.

Alex rolled her eyes; so much for the self-control. “I don’t know. Now it’s just talking. Before we were supposed to get drinks or dinner after.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, she’s probably just waiting for things to blow over, you know?”

“Maybe.”

“You should respond.”

“And say what?”

“I don’t know, tell her how this went. I promise, no peeking!” Kara slipped on her glasses and covered her eyes for good measure. 

Alex deliberated for a few minutes, finally settling on: “She took it really well. Sort of already knew, actually. Hope you’re having a nice weekend.” 

“Are you done yet?” Kara called, and Alex snickered at the rush of memories from when they were younger and Alex would force Kara to put on her glasses and cover her eyes while she did things like wrap presents or hide her favorite cereal, knowing that it would all be gone in a day if Kara found out where it was.

“Yeah.”

“What’d you say?”

“None of your business.”

“Alex,” Kara whined.

“Kara,” Alex mimicked. 

“C’mon, I’m your sister.”

“It wasn’t anything big. Just said that it went well and that I hope she’s having a good weekend.”

“Hmm.”

“Exactly. It’s boring.”

Eventually, conceding that there wasn’t too much left that she could do to help with the Maggie situation, Kara fished out the remote and let Alex pick their show for the afternoon while she placed an order for delivery, ready to settle in for an afternoon of much-needed downtime. With Cadmus presumably gearing up before the latest round of attacks, she would take any amount of time she could get. 

\---

“Got a lead. 8pm meet me in front of P.J.’s. And look nice.” 

Alex drummed her fingers on the lab table in front of her. She hadn’t heard much from Maggie at all that week, but her heart still sped up at the sight of a text message from her. Obviously it wasn’t a date, but Alex couldn’t help the way her mind drifted to a world in which it could be. A world in which Maggie might text her to meet her somewhere for a surprise date after a long week at work. She shook her head; it didn’t do to dwell on things that would never be. 

Instead she made her way down to the DEO supply room where they kept a variety of clothing made out of their special bulletproof fabric. Not that Maggie had said anything about tonight’s adventure being dangerous, but it never hurt to be cautious. 

She settled on a blue dress with a small, diamond-shaped cut out. It would leave a few more inches vulnerable, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to show off a little for Maggie. 

That night she left work early and went home to shower, change, style her hair, and put on makeup before they were scheduled to meet. She excused the lengthy prep time as being thorough in following the instructions to look nice. After a moment’s deliberation, she slipped a small pistol into a thigh holster, ignoring the way it chafed at her inner thighs. It’d be worth it if they ran into trouble. 

Kara swung by to give Alex a lift to the alleyway behind P.J.’s, promising not to listen in on her conversation with Maggie but insisting that she be allowed to track their movements in case it was Cadmus-related. 

With one last hug for good luck, Alex walked the last few feet to the front of the bar, finding Maggie standing there looking like a damn vision in a black dress that flattered her curves, her hair falling in soft waves around her shoulders. “Wow.”

Maggie spun around at that. “Danvers, you made it!”

“I…um, yeah, of course.”

“You clean up nice.”

“Thanks.” Alex swallowed heavily as she felt the weight of Maggie’s gaze on her. “So do you with, you know, the shoes and the hair and all,” she finished lamely, gesturing up and down. “What, uh, what are we doing here?”

“You’ll see.” Maggie motioned to the car with its flashers on out front and held open the passenger’s side door for Alex. Once they were on the road, Maggie sighed. “Sorry, I know you guys probably have solid tech to protect your phones, but after the past few days, I can’t be sure about the things I send on mine.”

“Oh. Right, yeah, of course.” 

“I got a tip about this masquerade ball being run by Roulette. Heard of her?” 

Alex felt her jaw clench. “Notorious for alien trafficking, right?”

“And notorious for having enough money and knowing enough important people to never be caught? Yeah, that’d be the one.” 

“What about her?”

“Remember that dead Syvillian we found a week or two ago?”

“Yeah.” It had been one of the last times Alex had seen Maggie before the almost-kiss incident.

“Between Supergirl’s information about his home planet and your confirmation that he had something in his bloodstream, I started following up on a few leads, asking around at the alien bar. It seems like these newly bloodthirsty aliens aren’t only good for stirring up public outcry; they also make for really good fighters.”

“So those wounds, the built-up scar tissue…he  _had_  been fighting?” 

“Seems Roulette’s been running an alien fight club of sorts. I don’t know if it’s a collaboration between her and Cadmus or if she’s involved with them or what, but I bet we could find out.”

“So what are we doing?”

“We’re attending her little masquerade ball tonight.” Without turning her attention away from the road, Maggie popped open the center console, fishing out two masks and handing a silver one over to Alex. “Gather some intel, try to make contacts, you know the drill.” 

Alex nodded, more than a little glad to be packing heat. “So what’s our cover?”

“I have an in with someone important enough for her circles to overlap with Roulette’s. She’s rich enough to get an invite, but not exactly pleased with what Roulette is doing. And you’re my plus one.”

“Cool. Yeah. Perfect.” The overly calm façade wasn’t fooling anyone, and Alex ignored Maggie’s gaze and opted to look out the window, watching as the city lights fell away. “So, um, yeah, how was your day?” 

Maggie’s lips twisted up into a small smile. “It was fine. Nothing special to report, but in our line of work, I suppose that’s a good thing.”

“Mm, yeah.”

“What about you?”

“Ran some more tests in the lab. I’m starting to get somewhere with the antidote to the compound they’re using to drug the aliens. Or no, not quite. I mean, it attacks the compound, so that's something, but it doesn’t kill it yet." Alex shrugged. "At least it’s better than my first go at it where it somehow merged and mutated into something so much deadlier.”

Maggie chuckled darkly. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.” 

A few minutes later, Maggie pulled into a parking lot filled with cars that seemed much too nice for their current placement alongside what looked like a dingy warehouse. She looked over at Alex before pulling her mask down. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.” Careful of her hair, Alex pulled the shimmery silver mask down over her eyes and nose, adjusting it until it seemed she had as much of her peripheral vision as she could hope for. 

As they walked to the warehouse, Maggie reached out and took Alex’s hand in hers, leaving Alex’s skin tingling and her feet barely cooperating as she tried to force them to move in a straight line. 

Maggie’s invitation passed inspection with the large bouncers at the front door, and they were soon ushered into an ornate ballroom that Alex would never have guessed stood behind the rusted metal exterior. Crowds of National City’s well-to-do elite mingled over glasses of champagne while jazz played softly in the background and drugged up aliens howled behind the soundproof Plexiglass cages that lined the perimeter.

Alex watched out of the corner of her eye as the muscles of Maggie’s jaw worked, her grip on Alex’s hand tightening with every new cage that loomed before them. Alex gave what she hoped was a reassuring squeeze back. “We’ll figure this out. Promise.”

Maggie gave her a barely perceptible nod in return, and then her mouth was turning up into a practiced smile as she accepted flutes of champagne from a passing server, handing one over to Alex. “Ready to mingle?”

The first couple of people they spoke to were dull and offered little in the way of information, but by their fourth stop or so, Alex and Maggie fell into a rhythm. They introduced themselves with lies that fell easily from their lips—too easily, perhaps, Alex thought, at least when it came to the question of their relationship. Mentioning that they were new to the events often earned them excited welcomes and promises of a “good show” to come at future visits, though one older man winked and swore Roulette wouldn’t let a night go by with nothing to show for it. 

“Now, I know that all aliens are dangerous,” Alex began, twirling a strand of hair around her index finger and popping her hip out, “but I heard some of them aren’t really known for fighting. If we’re going to come all the way out to”—Alex wrinkled her nose in feigned disgust—“this kind of neighborhood, I’d like to at least have it be worth my while.”

The act worked better than Maggie could have hoped with a forty-something banker type named Tom who clearly thought he might have a chance at going home with the two of them—something Alex had been willing to lean into for the possibility of extra information once he revealed he’d been involved with the fight club from the start. “Well, if the incentives Roulette offers to the winners aren’t enough, there are always the steroids. God, they get big so fast. And mean. I swear I watched this massive white one rip an arm off—”

“Oh, I see,” Alex interjected, feeling Maggie trembling with anger beside her. “That makes more sense then.”

“They’ve always had it within them, of course. Roulette just helps put it on display better.”

Alex hummed in feigned agreement, wondering when she started thinking of nameless, faceless aliens as anything other than potential threats, and sipped at her drink until the arrival of some corporate bigwig from his job distracted Tom.

Figuring they had enough in the way of background information and unwilling to listen to another xenophobic rant, Maggie led Alex across the main room by the hand, lingering long enough at different points along the way so as not to rouse suspicion. Under the guise of searching for a bathroom, they slipped into a row of makeshift offices, and Alex got to work picking locks while Maggie’s gaze raked over the documents that appeared to have been stuffed hastily into unlocked cabinets and drawers.

They didn’t manage to find any sort of formulas for the drug, but Alex snapped photos of various financial documents, and Maggie found promotional materials for upcoming fights, taking down the names and species of all the aliens that were to appear, along with their fighting records for the ones who had apparently been around long enough to have one.

Near the end of their investigation of the files in the third office, they heard the sound of heavy footfalls approaching.

“Fuck,” Alex cursed under her breath, shoving folders back into drawers and wiping at the surfaces to smear any trace of their fingerprints that might remain.

The footfalls grew closer and closer.

“I have a gun.” Alex’s voice was barely audible, but Maggie’s head snapped up at the words. She’d strapped a knife to her thigh, but the guards they had seen were all heavily armed, and she wasn’t willing to risk her life in close combat if she had another option.

“Where?”

“Thigh holster.” 

Alex bent slightly to retrieve it, but then a key was scraping in the lock, and Maggie was muttering out a sincere apology, panic flashing in her eyes before she dropped to her knees, slipping her hands under the hem of Alex’s dress and avoiding eye contact as she lingered between Alex’s legs. With a startled gasp, Alex's hands found purchase on the desk behind her just in time for a burly guard to crash through the door and lumber into the room. He stopped short at the sight that met him.

“Fuck,” Alex repeated, her voice breathier than she’d hoped. Later she would pretend she was simply that good at acting.

Maggie tilted her head back to look at Alex at the same moment her hands curled around the pistol she’d freed from its holster. “Babe,” she whined, "what's wrong?" 

“I, um, there," Alex stammered, pretending that her heart rate was skyrocketing only because there was currently an armed guard standing in front of her.

Maggie whipped her head around at that, acting surprised at the appearance of an audience.

The moment Maggie saw him raise a hand to his earpiece, presumably preparing to call for backup, she acted on instinct, whipping the gun out from beneath the hem of Alex's dress and shooting him in the leg—not at all lethal but enough to send him to the ground.

In an instant, Alex had disarmed him and secured his own cuffs around his wrists. She handed over his gun to Maggie to shove into her clutch as she slid her own pistol back into the holster.

“A silencer? Really?” Maggie mouthed as they tip-toed out the door.

“It helped, didn’t it?” Alex whispered.

They were both distraught and pleased to find that two aliens had been brought out to fight as a “preview” of the next event. Horrifying as it was, it meant no one was paying enough attention to have noted their long disappearance, and they were able to slip out unnoticed, feeding lines about a “headache” to the bouncers by way of an excuse.

They drove in silence for a mile or two before Maggie let out a ragged breath, her knuckles still white from the tight grip she had on the steering wheel.

“Do you need me to drive?” Alex asked.

“No…no, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look all that fine.”

“It’s just, I know some of the aliens who are supposedly fighting—or scheduled to fight. I don’t need to see them dead in a cage or hopped up on alien steroids and unrecognizable from the individuals I once knew. I mean, Christ, some of them are just kids, Alex.”

Alex wasn’t quite sure what to say in return, so she let her actions speak for her and reached out a warm hand, placing it on top of Maggie’s on the wheel, letting the steady contact soothe her.

“Look, I…I can't." Maggie shook her head and sucked in a deep breath. "Are you okay to go to the alien bar? This isn’t quite how I was planning on introducing you to it, but I need to get out some warnings, maybe try to get information from the ones who have been fighting already.”

“Of course. You know you’ve got me. Always.”

A small smile tugged at the corners of Maggie’s mouth. “You know, I never thought I worked well with a partner. Certainly didn’t like it when the Captain made me do it. But you and I?” Maggie tilted her head in consideration. “We might actually work.”

\---

After several attempts at conversations with aliens who had no desire to talk, Maggie finally managed to gather enough scraps of information to feel like they had accomplished something. They’d learned that the drug was, in most cases, taken voluntarily: an initial “free sample” to give the new fighters better odds at winning against seasoned pros, which in turn gave them better odds at taking home a meager cut of the proceeds from any given fight. And wins counted toward their final score. Hit a high enough number, and be released from the fighting contract with a lump some of money to pad the deal.

Of course, Alex and Maggie also heard rumors of aliens who had been lured in with promises of easy money only to end up shackled in cages between bouts, held against their will for months on end and forced to fight until the life drained out of them. But the most recent fighters appeared to have chosen—not quite freely, but more so than the first batch had.

“How else am I supposed to make money looking like this?” one alien with a row of spiked ridges running down his spine asked with a snarl. "You gonna hire me?"

Another with a poorly stitched up jagged cut running down the side of his face shrugged, saying it was still better than the few dollars he got under the table for long days of factory labor. He hadn't taken any of the drugs yet, but he shrugged off their pleas not to. "You do what you have to do to get by." 

It was M’gann who explained to them that she’d gotten roped into fighting but never took the proffered “enhancements.” She was working off a debt she refused to talk about, but she made it clear that she would do so as honestly as she could within a corrupt system. “That drug…” she trailed off, shaking her head with a grimace. “They don’t come back from it. One dose isn’t enough to change them, but it’s enough to get them hooked. And suddenly they don’t care that it was about getting enough wins to get their cash and get out. Suddenly the fight is enough. It's all they care about.”

“And then they end up on the streets, terrorizing National City,” Alex surmised.

“Or dead,” M’gann shot back, glaring at the newcomer.

“And we’re trying to keep that from happening.” Maggie set a hand on Alex’s shoulder and guided her back a step or two. “I just…there’s a list of new recruits. If I give it to you, any chance you can keep an eye out for them? Try to stop them from taking the drugs if you can.”

“I make no promises, but for you, Maggie, I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

Maggie still looked beyond stressed, but Alex was pleased with the progress they’d made. They had new information, and she had financial documents to run, along with names and species of aliens to be on the lookout for. She still needed to work on a cure, but with the looming promise of aliens who could be helped, who could be brought back to themselves, she felt renewed motivation to tackle the problem.

As they turned the corner to leave the bar, Alex crashed into a tall woman who looked so very familiar.

The woman looked Alex up and down, then rolled her eyes at Maggie. “You move on fast.”

She was gone before the pieces clicked into place for Alex. “What…?”

“She’s my ex,” Maggie murmured as she dragged Alex the last few feet to the door, making her way over to the car and unlocking the doors for them.

“Your ex?”

Maggie nodded, turning the key in the ignition and pulling out onto the sleepy side streets.

“She’s my neighbor’s ex.”

Maggie’s foot slipped off the gas with a twitch. Heedless of the car's slowing to a stop on the quiet back roads, Maggie swung around to look at Alex. “Did you… Where do you live?”

As everything clicked into place, Alex’s jaw dropped open in horror. “Oh my god. Are  _you_ 404?”

“You’re 403?”

“You’re the one who has all the loud sex against my bedroom wall?” Alex yelped.

“Hey! At least I’m not the one who took the whole ‘fuck me gently with a chainsaw’ line as an instruction manual based on what I hear coming through your wall.”

Alex spluttered, sure her cheeks were stained a deep shade of red. “I—that was—that was twice! And I didn't know you were home!”

Maggie let out a shaky exhale as she hit the gas again, jolting them forward. “Guess I don’t have to ask where to take you at the end of the night, huh?”

They sat in awkward silence for blocks until they arrived at their shared apartment building. Maggie pulled the car into a spot and let them in through the front door, lingering for a moment in the entryway by the row of mailboxes.

“Sorry,” Alex nearly whispered.

“What?”

“I’m sorry for the, um, note.”

“Oh. Uh…me too.” After a moment Maggie added, “Also for the volume. I didn’t realize…the last guy that lived there never said anything.”

“Yeah, the, uh, walls are pretty thin, I think.” Alex rubbed at the back of her neck and wondered if it was possible to die from acute awkwardness.

“Yeah…I’d say they definitely are.”

“Right.” Alex tapped her foot. “So, um, good night.”

She didn’t think she’d ever made it up the stairs faster.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Home for the week, so I may be a little slow in replying to comments, but I promise I'm reading them on my phone and absolutely adoring them!! Can't wait to hear what you think of the fallout from the revelation and the progress on the case! My favorite chapter in this fic is coming up this week too... 
> 
> Also, in case anyone missed it but still wants another 16k of Sanvers, I posted a bodyguard/celebrity AU here - https://archiveofourown.org/works/15110516

Alex spent three weeks living in near-silence. She shooed Kara out of the apartment and insisted they host sister night at her place and only ever at her place. She watched Netflix on her laptop with headphones. She barely used the oven to prevent additional smoke alarm incidents. After a week or so, she began taking solace in the quiet of her balcony, feeling slightly less claustrophobic when she had city blocks to look out over instead of four solid walls—one of which she refused to even look at.

Maggie’s apartment remained quiet too. Only once did Alex hear low voices, but that was followed soon afterward by a door closing. Alex wondered idly whether Maggie had started spending most of her free time at Jenna’s place.

They ran into each other somewhat regularly at crime scenes, trading information in clipped tones with gazes averted. Otherwise they kept their distance. The one time they’d bumped into each other in the lobby, Maggie had murmured out some excuse about needing to go downstairs first. Alex wondered if she had done it out of politeness, not wanting to trudge up four flights of stairs together while making stilted conversation. 

At the end of week three, Alex heard a door slam next door. Muffled yelling rose and rose in volume, punctuated by a much quieter voice. The sounds got closer and closer to the shared wall until Alex could hear shushing noises from the voice she now knew was Maggie’s.

“Are you kidding me? You’re more concerned with some fucking neighbor maybe possibly hearing us argue than you are about losing this relationship? God, this is all proof of how little you care, Maggie.”

Alex excused herself, settling in on the balcony where the noise couldn’t quite reach her. She liked to think Maggie would have done the same for her. Not that Alex believed a word of what Jenna was saying. She knew Maggie better than that, knew she cared—cared deeply—and nothing some woman said could ever convince her otherwise.

After that night, quiet noises began filtering back through the wall. Muted strands of music. A particularly loud scene in a movie. The oven timer. The dull roar of a vacuum cleaner and the intermittent  _thump_  as it bumped into the baseboards.

Alex, in turn, eased her vow of silence, daring to watch television without headphones, inviting Kara back over, making popcorn, risking the oven. The vibrator stayed tucked away on the top shelf of her closet, though; there was only so much humiliation she could take.

A few days after the breakup, Alex found she couldn’t sleep in, so she took her coffee out onto the balcony to watch the sun rise, bathing the sky in yellows and oranges and light pink hues. As she stood outside, her mug resting against the railing, a soft voice surprised her.

“Didn’t think anyone else was up this early.”

The softness of the tone didn’t keep Alex from startling, leaping into a defensive pose as her coffee mug tumbled through the air, falling to the blessedly empty street below with a loud crash.

They both peered over the railing, staring at the shattered ceramic lying in bits among the splattered coffee stain.

It started out as a little huff of laughter, but then it was growing and morphing into full-blown hysterics before either of them could try to stop it. And it wasn’t funny—certainly not  _that_ funny—but Alex could feel her whole body shaking with the force of her laughter, and Maggie was wiping away tears from the corner of her eyes as she tried to gain control of her breathing once more, and for the first time since the truth came out the lingering awkwardness appeared to have dissipated.

“I really needed that,” Maggie finally managed.

“Yeah…yeah, I think I did too.”

“Sorry ’bout the mug.”

Alex shrugged. “Eh, I could probably do with fewer mugs.”

“Then I guess I’m more sorry about the coffee in it.”

“Now that’s a real reason to apologize.”

The corners of Maggie’s mouth turned up into a smile. “Mine should be ready in a minute. Can I make it up to you with a fresh cup?”

“That’s a compelling offer, Sawyer…”

“If you break my mug, though, you owe me a new one.”

“I make no promises.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Shaking her head, Maggie strode back into her apartment, emerging a few minutes later in a worn NCPD sweatshirt with two mugs of coffee in her hands. “Here.” She stretched as far as she could, just managing to get it to Alex across the gap.

“Thanks.”

Maggie hummed into her coffee, her gaze somewhere far away.

“I…uh, how are you doing?”

Maggie grimaced. “Guess you heard, huh?”

“I left pretty soon after it started, but…sort of.”

“Yeah, well…I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do it. I’m the one that’s hard-headed and stubborn and obsessed with work and borderline sociopathic.”

“Hey, that’s not true, Maggie. You have to know none of that’s true.”

“It’s a little true.” She slowly turned the mug around in her hands. “I wasn’t—I could have spent more nights at home with her, called in one of the other detectives to work some of the cases.”

Alex leaned on the railing, shaking her head at Maggie. “That doesn’t make you a bad partner. It just makes you…passionate about your work, passionate about seeing justice done. It’s what makes you the woman I’ve fa—I’ve gotten to know and come to respect.”

“I could have fought for justice during the daytime hours.” Maggie looked down at the concrete of the balcony, toeing at it with a socked foot. “But instead I went running every time I heard there was something that might,  _maybe_ , be related to Cadmus. I went running every time”—she took a deep breath—“every time I thought you might be there.”

Alex didn’t think it was possible to trip while standing still, but that was exactly what it felt like.

“Don’t drop my mug.”

“I’m not,” Alex grumbled, pulling it back from the railing for good measure.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

“I—I think it does.”

“It doesn’t.”

And Alex wanted to argue, to press Maggie, to figure out what it meant that she had been part of the equation. But when Maggie looked up, all Alex could see was a scared, exhausted woman. So she bit her tongue and took another sip of the coffee.

“I should go. Get into the office. Last night I got a call from M’gann about a possible in with one of the newest recruits to the fight club.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I don’t wanna get my hopes up, but so far the guy hasn’t wanted to take the drugs. He’s willing to fight for the cash, but he didn’t quite get the extent of it when he signed on. Maybe…I don’t know, maybe he could testify against her at some point. Not that it’s ever done any good.” Maggie groaned using her free hand to rub at her eyes.

“Hey, you’re a great detective, and if anyone could bring Roulette down, it would be you.”

“I’m not—you shouldn’t be so sure. I might not be enough to convince him to turn against her or be willing to testify on something that big. It could be nothing.”

“Maggie? Maggie, look at me.” After a moment, Maggie lifted her chin until she was holding Alex’s gaze. “You want proof of how persuasive you are?” Maggie shrugged her shoulders. “Guess who’s out as part of the DEO’s newest parole policy?”

“Who?”

“Scorcher. As of yesterday.”

“Wait. What?”

“Well…I heard what you said. And, I mean, she did still burn down some warehouses, so I didn’t really care much at first. But after, uh, after you took me to the bar, I tracked down some old leads from that case, asked around about the men she claimed had come to try to grab her. At first I assumed she had been paranoid.” Alex sipped at her coffee as she considered her words. “And she definitely is. But…she was also right in this case. We tracked down some old surveillance footage, and Supergirl picked the two guys up a couple of days ago.”

“Who are they?”

Alex sucked her lower lip between her teeth. “I can’t be sure, but I think—or maybe I’m just getting my hopes up, desperately looking for some sort of foothold in this case—but I think they might be tied to Roulette.”

“Really?”

“They had lists of aliens—addresses, species, abilities. The ones with notes by their names all seemed to be the ones with powers that might, uh”—Alex gestured around with her hand, looking off into the distance—“make for good fights. Something that people would pay money to see.”

“Shit.”

“I don’t think they’ve got much in the way of information—probably some low-level lackeys or hired muscle, if anything—but, I don’t know, maybe it’s something.”

“Alex, that’s great. Seriously.”

“I—I was planning on telling you. It’s just that we only yesterday confirmed some of the details, and then I wasn’t sure if it would pan out, and—”

“I trust you.” It was said with such certainty that Alex couldn’t help but smile. “But I really should get ready for work. Maybe we could meet up later today? Go over some of these case details?”

“Sounds good.”

“Mind if we meet at the DEO. I’m still not sure about security at my office.”

“Of course. Just text when you’re on your way.”

Maggie nodded and shot Alex a small smile before turning to head back inside.

“Wait!” Alex yelled, blushing a faint shade of pink at the dramatics. “Sorry, I just, um, I have your mug still.”

“Ah yes, couldn’t let you go off with my”—Maggie squinted at the faded print on the ceramic—“Gotham Pride mug.”

Alex’s mouth twitched. “No, definitely not. Very important mug right here.”

\---

“Alex,” came J’onn’s voice—louder than usual.

Alex pulled herself up from the microscope, wincing at the sharp pain that shot through her lower back and neck after having spent hours upon hours hunched over Petri dishes, computer monitors, and microscopes.

Before she could turn around and complain about the interruption, J’onn cleared his throat. “You have a visitor.”

“Shit, Maggie!”

“What a greeting, Danvers.” At that, J’onn stepped away, leaving them to it.

Alex spun around and found Maggie leaning up against the door frame, her arms folded over her chest and a cheeky smile pulling up the corners of her mouth.

“It’s already 4, isn’t it?”

“It’s actually 4:20… I had a nice chat with the security guard until your boss came and found me.”

Alex dropped her head into her hands, dragging her fingers down her face. “I’m so sorry. I just—I though I was maybe starting to get somewhere with the steroid, so I put my phone on silent because Kara kept sending me cat memes, but I didn’t even think to turn it back on, and then you got stuck for 20 whole—”

“You’re fine.”

“No, it’s not fine. I should have respected your time.” Alex groaned. She hated few things more than being called down to a meeting only for everyone else to be late or for her to find that there was really no need for her presence. Every minute spent there was a reminder of how much work she could have been doing.

“You know you’re talking to the woman who just got dumped for being obsessed with work, right? I think I understand getting swept up in a case.”

Alex let out a huff of air. “Yeah…I guess. Suppose that’s why we work well together.”

Maggie hummed, coming around to Alex’s lab bunch and peering at the notebook pages cluttered with barely legible scrawl. “So what do you have?”

“Well, I don’t necessarily  _have_ anything yet, but I realized why nothing has been working—or not working in the way that I need it to.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“I’d been operating under the assumption that the compound I was able to isolate in the blood was the steroid itself, but I think—and I’m not completely positive, but now that we’ve gotten a few blood samples from aliens who have taken it, I’ve got a better idea—but I think whatever the drug is, it mutates once it’s injected.”

“So you’re finding different strands of it in the different aliens?”

Alex's face lit up at the active participation; she had seen too many sets of eyes glaze over the minute she got into something that was less guns and action and more pipetting and waiting. “Yeah, or at least, kind of. There are some components that stay the same across all three of them, so now I’m trying to start from those—figure out what I can gather from the commonalities before I try to tackle getting to what it is that lets the drug sort of…fuse with their own blood cells.”

Maggie’s fingers drummed against the metal of the lab table, and her mouth twitched as she thought. “Would it help if you got a sample of the drug itself, before it’s interacted with blood?”

“Uh, yeah, very much so. You gonna make my day and tell me you have some?”

“No…but I might know where we could get it.”

Alex motioned for Maggie to continue, trying to keep her excitement at the prospect of a real breakthrough in check in case the lead didn’t pan out.

“How do you feel about a field trip?”

The nod of agreement was all Maggie needed, and within minutes Maggie had them outside the DEO with a leg thrown over her Triumph. “Grab your bike and follow me to the alien bar, okay?”

“I, um, sure?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I met Kara for breakfast this morning, so she just fl—walked me to work. Do you have a minute so I have to go back for my bike?”

“Oh.” After a moment, Maggie’s mouth curled up into a smirk. “Guess it’s your turn to ride bitch.”

Even as Alex put up a show of resistance, she couldn’t stop her heart from pounding at the idea of getting to curl up around Maggie again. Of course, she knew it was professional. Work. Nothing more. But no amount of logic could quell the heat pooling low in her stomach, pulsing through her veins and radiating outward until her whole body felt like it was on fire at the mere possibility.

Alex spent the whole ride trying to will away the persistent thrum of desire, but her body seemed intent on reminding her that being curled up around Maggie was absolutely something she wanted to do more of. Maybe with fewer clothes. Definitely with fewer clothes.

She was distracted enough to be surprised by their arrival at the bar.

“So, how was I?”

“What?” Alex’s voice was muffled underneath the helmet, but she wasn’t sure she wanted Maggie to get a good look at her face until she’d gotten a moment or two of distance.

“Does my driving pass muster?”

“Oh! Uh, yeah, you're great—great driving, I mean.”

Alex swore she saw a glint of something in Maggie’s eyes, but then she was turning around and knocking on the door and feeding the password through the little slot before Alex could get a closer look.

The mid-afternoon crowd on a Tuesday was much quieter than the late night crew, but Maggie left Alex little time to linger and look around, striding straight up to the bar and asking for M’gann.

The woman emerged after a couple of minutes, a dish towel in her hand and wisps of hair falling out of her bun and into her eyes. “Maggie? What’s wrong?”

“I”—glancing around, Maggie motioned to one of the booths—“can we talk?”

M’gann eyed Alex warily but followed Maggie back to the booth. Once they were settled in, she inclined her head in Alex’s direction. “You trust her?”

“She’s the reason Scorcher’s out now and safe from the men that came for her.”

Alex spluttered under M’gann’s gaze. “Maggie! Certain things aren’t exactly”—she gestured around them and dropped her voice even lower—“public information.”

With a shake of her head, Maggie chuckled. “Trust me, she already knows more than you’d ever believe.”

“What is it you need, Maggie?”

“Right. The steroids?” M’gann’s features hardened, and she swallowed heavily. “I know you didn’t take them, but did you…did you keep them?”

M’gann’s gaze darted over to Alex again. “Why? Am I going to be arrested and never heard from again?”

Figuring it was now or never when it came to proving her loyalty, Alex sat up straighter and faced M’gann head on. “Because I’m trying to reverse engineer a cure of sorts—something that would counter the drug’s effects for those who have been infected. I—they deserve to be able to go back to their old selves, their old lives.”

“The same lives that drove them to Roulette in the first place,” M’gann scoffed.

“You know what, at least I’m trying,” Alex snapped, ignoring Maggie’s attempts at intervention. “I didn’t create the system, and I’m not the one trying to exploit it for profit in some sort of barbaric fight club. I’m trying to help. And no, it’s not going to fix everything. But at least I’m doing what I can. What are you doing?”

M’gann held up a hand to stop Maggie again. “What do I do? I help keep this little safe haven running. I give the aliens here some tiny kernel of hope that maybe— _maybe_ , their lives can be better than what they know, that there are spaces where they don’t have to be afraid all the time.”

“Then why fight for her? Why bring in more money to people like her? Why go participate in the same system you’re trying to save everyone else from?”

“We don’t always have a choice about when we participate.” M’gann shook her head, pulling her lips between her teeth and sucking in a deep breath through her nose. “Sometimes your only choice is doing your best from within the prison of a system.”

“Yet you’d fault me for doing the same.”

The silence stretched on long enough that Maggie looked ready to throw herself between the two women who both meant so much to her for such different reasons.

But then M’gann was reaching a hand out across the table. “If anything comes of this project, you’ll keep me updated?”

“We will,” Alex promised, shaking on it.

“And for the ones who won’t willingly bring themselves to the DEO for the antidote?”

“We’ll get it to you or someone else,” Maggie chimed in.

“If you don’t mind waiting, I can get you the vial they gave me after my shift here ends.”

“That would be perfect.”

“Thank you,” Alex added.

“If Maggie trusts you…” M’gann left the rest unsaid, pushing up and out of the booth as she made her way behind the bar.

“Well,” Alex sighed, “I guess that’s progress.”

“It is.”

“Don’t think your friend likes me.”

Maggie chuckled. “If she gets to see even a little bit of the person I’ve seen you be recently, I think she’ll come around.”

“You getting soft on me?”

“You’re the one that let a hardened arsonist walk,” Maggie teased, pulling a low laugh from Alex. “Now how about a drink?”

They spent the next few hours drinking and chatting and playing pool. Maggie introduced Alex to a few of her friends from the bar, and Alex got her ass handed to her in darts, grumbling about how if it were a shooting contest, she’d have won by a landslide. Over a dinner they hadn't ordered but that showed up courtesy of M’gann with instructions to “try sobering up,” they got to talking a bit more about the breakup, and Maggie rolled her eyes at Alex’s continued insistence that no one in their right minds would ever end things with Maggie.

“Yeah, well, you heard her. She did a pretty convincing job.”

“She didn’t know what she had—that’s all. ’S not your fault.”

“Not like I bring anything special to the table.”

“No!” Spurred on by the newest glass of whiskey and the unwillingness to see Maggie look so upset, Alex reached out, resting her hand on Maggie’s. “That’s not true. You’re—you’re smart and hardworking.”

“Too hardworking—at least at my job, apparently.”

“Lies,” Alex declared with a note of finality in her voice that brokered no disagreement. “You’re passionate.”

“Sounds like spin.” And Maggie was still putting herself down, but there was a small smile on her lips, so Alex counted it as a win.

“Not spin; just the truth. You’re passionate and so, so beautiful, Maggie. And you’re generous with your time and energy, and you’re so compassionate. Plus, you make things fun—like, even things that shouldn’t be fun are fun with you—so your dates must be super fun too, and, um”—Alex flicked her wrist a few times, gesturing wildly as she looked to the wall closest to them—“you know, uh, through the wall, you sounded like…like that was…I mean you didn’t appear to be deficient there either.”

Maggie smirked up at Alex, her tongue tracing along her teeth. “Hear something you like, Danvers?” Maggie’s mouth dropped open the moment it happened. “Shit, sorry. No, I—I crossed a line there. Just…please ignore me. I’m sleep-deprived and running on all caffeine and scotch.”

“You’re fine,” Alex insisted, even as she could feel her heart hammering and something sparking in her chest that felt an awful lot like desire—a heady, reckless desire that made things like reaching out and dragging Maggie into the back alleyway sound like a good idea.

Before she could do something stupid like lean over and cup Maggie’s jaw in her hand and show her exactly what it was she liked and wanted, M’gann interrupted them, and Alex swore it looked like she knew exactly what she was interrupting. “I’m done for the night. You want to follow me back to my place?”

Maggie jolted up, blinking rapidly at the change in position. Unsteady on her feet, she swayed back and forth. “Oh…I—I shouldn’t drive.”

M’gann shook her head and pursed her lips. “I’m close enough to walk, and then we can call you both cabs.”

“We can take the same one, it’s fine,” Alex said, missing the way M’gann’s eyebrows shot up.

“Really?” M’gann mouthed at Maggie.

“We’re, uh, next-door neighbors, actually.”

“Wait.” For the first time Alex saw a playful smile brightening M’gann’s face, and she wondered whether this was closer to how she and Maggie acted when she wasn’t around. “Next-door neighbor as in smoke alarms and notes and chainsaw-sounding—”

“That’s enough!” Maggie yelped, ignoring the bright red blush staining Alex’s cheeks and creeping up her chest. “We, um, we’ve moved past that.”

“Mm, bet you have.”

Maggie didn’t leave M’gann any time to elaborate, nudging her toward the door and dragging Alex with her.

The walk went quickly enough, and within a few minutes of arriving, they had the small vial safely tucked away in Alex's bag and were being shuffled into a cab and sent home.

“You need to stop at”—Maggie glanced at the driver in the rearview mirror—“your… _office_  first?”

Alex shook her head. “I’ll call Ka—I’ll get it safely to work.”

Maggie’s eyebrows furrowed, but she let it drop.

\---

The next morning, Alex woke to a gentle but insistent knocking. Grumbling about early hours and hangovers after having stayed up late to make sure Kara got everything safely to the DEO, Alex pulled herself out of bed and made it halfway to the door before realizing the knocking had been coming from inside her bedroom. She narrowed her eyes and glared at the wall, then knocked back.

“Balcony?” Maggie half-yelled, ensuring Alex could hear every syllable.

Cursing herself for not stopping to brush her teeth before answering the knocking, Alex shuffled out onto the balcony, wrapping her arms tightly around her to ward off the early morning chill.

“How ya feeling?” Maggie asked, leaning over the railing with a second mug of coffee.

“This should help.”

“Figured you could use it. They’ve got a, uh, pretty generous pour there.”

Alex snorted. “You can say that again.”

“Anyway, M’gann texted me overnight.”

“Yeah?”

“About the fight club alien who might talk to us. He’s a Brevakk, apparently.”

“Brevakks.” Alex closed her eyes and tried to push past the headache to remember what she knew about them, what had been in the DEO handbook she was forced to memorize cover-to-cover during her first month of training.

“Defensive mechanism with the—”

“Spikes along the arms, right.” Alex nodded slowly. “So who is this guy?”

“I don’t know. Goes by Quill in the ring. Apparently he’s gone pretty off the grid since trying to escape his contract. Thinks Roulette’s gonna send people for him, even if he does keep fighting for her.”

“But he’s still wiling to talk?”

“Maybe.” Maggie rolled out her neck and rubbed at her temples. “He trusts M’gann, so he’s willing to listen to what we have to say.”

“I’m sensing a but here.”

“But he’s living out in the woods in the middle of nowhere at the moment.”

“Okay…”

Maggie’s eyes sparkled with mischief as she lifted her mug to her lips. “So what do you say to that camping trip?”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lots of work on the case, two of the characters finally meet, and someone new drops in...

Alex spent all of Wednesday running tests on the pure version of the drug, eventually isolating an unknown chemical add-on that she assumed was being synthetically manufactured—where and by whom, of course, remained up for debate. Not that Alex was content with letting it stay a question, which is precisely why she hadn't left her lab all day. 

That afternoon found Kara sitting in Alex’s lab, her legs crossed under her as she hovered high enough above one of the empty benches for Alex to stop complaining about the “dirt residue” she could be leaving behind. Kara just rolled her eyes, knowing Alex wiped them down every night and again every morning for good measure.

“How’s it going?”

“Not well enough,” Alex grumbled, folding her arms on top of her desk and dropping her head down into the crook of her elbow.

“I bet that’s not true.”

“It is.” Alex forced her head back up, casting a forlorn glance in the direction of all her machines. “I can’t—I don’t get it. I swear I’ve synthesized it and isolated everything, but there’s still some weird structure attached the molecule that doesn’t seem to be doing anything, but why would there be something that didn’t need to be there? You don’t spend money to add something totally unnecessary. So clearly I’m missing whatever it is this…this thing does, and it’s probably the key to engineering a cure, and I’m too stupid to see it.”

“First of all, no one would ever think you were stupid.” Alex brushed off the compliment. “But what do you mean it’s unnecessary?”

“I—it’s totally inert, you know? Like when I isolate it, it doesn’t react with anything—not even clean alien blood samples. And when I keep the full structure and inject it into a blood sample, it just sort of disappears. Or not disappears, you know, but it gets carried right along with the chemicals that I think are doing the active work of mutating the cells.”

Kara scrunched up her nose as she considered it. “What if it’s not meant to do anything?”

“Why would you make something that doesn’t do anything? Anything extra you add is going to cost money and make the drug more expensive to manufacture or buy, and Roulette seems the type to want to make money off aliens, not spend extra on something for them.”

Kara’s fingers drummed out a steady beat against her thigh as she floated. “What if it were…branding?”

“You mean like marketing?”

Kara shrugged. “CatCo’s logo is stamped on everything.”

“And maybe that add-on is a kind of chemical signature…”

Kara noted the exact moment she lost Alex to her thoughts, as her gaze drifted away from Kara, growing unfocused just as her lips began to twitch, like she was running through some complex argument that only she was privy to. Figuring her presence would only serve as a distraction, Kara let herself out, quietly shutting the door behind her and hanging up the, “Scientist at work. Do not disturb upon penalty of death,” sign Alex had made for her office after a new recruit had run in without knocking and startled Alex enough for her to twitch, knocking over a vial of putrid alien bile that made her entire lab reek for days on end.

That was exactly how Kara in full Supergirl attire and Maggie found Alex two hours later. Peering through the door, Kara found that Alex was pacing instead of actively running experiments, so she knocked five times in the pattern Alex would recognize as hers.

“Hey!” Kara called out slightly too loudly the moment Alex swung open the door, determined to preempt any possible greeting with her real name. “Look who I found?”

“Maggie?”

“Hey.” Maggie waved back at Alex, crossing her arms as Kara breezed past her and into the lab.

“What’s, uh, what’s up? Why are you two…together…in my lab?”

“I came by to see how you were, bring you some dinner.” It was then that Alex noticed the bag in Maggie’s hand from the same empanadas food truck she had been at all that time ago. Maybe Maggie had noticed her after all. “Figured with all the work you might have forgotten to eat.”

“I already brought her lunch,” Kara huffed, fixing Maggie with a stern glare and completely missing Alex’s frantic gestures to stop while she was ahead. “You should probably go run along back to your girlfriend now. We can handle it from here.”

Maggie narrowed her eyes, and Alex stumbled forward. “Sorry, uh, Supergirl here has been giving me a hand after stopping a bank robbery, so she’s just a little tired. Isn’t that right, Supergirl?” Alex hissed, arching her eyebrows at Kara.

“I…could be.” Kara tapped her foot on the ground. “Is…what we talked about earlier, did that help at all?”

“Sort of.” Alex rubbed at her head, pointing at a few slides and dishes and vials she had all lined up along two of the benches. Maggie slipped between them, walking up and down the rows and peering at them from a safe distance. “I think you were right, but it just…I can’t figure out whose branding it would be.”

“What’s this one?” Maggie pointed at one of the slides.

“It’s literally just the drug, pure and simple.”

“Oh…did you dye it a different color?”

“No, no. It changes color when it’s exposed to air outside the vial."

Maggie narrowed her eyes as she studied the droplet. “I’ve seen that shade of purple before, I know it.” Kara and Alex hurried over, peering down at it with Maggie.

With a gasp, Kara hit Alex’s shoulder a little too hard in her excitement, shoving Alex into Maggie. “The LuthorCorp logo!”

“Shit, yeah,” Maggie exhaled, pulling her phone out of her back pocket and opening a photo of the old logo before Lex’s little sister had taken over and rebranded everything under a much less xenophobic, homicidal corporate ideology.

“Well, fuck.”

After nearly a full minute of silence, Maggie snorted. “Nothing’s ever as simple as it seems with you guys, is it?”

Alex let out a groan. “It doesn’t help that we’ve got three Luthors to go track down.”

“Alex,” Kara huffed, “I told you, Lena’s doing things a new way.”

“It doesn’t make her not a suspect.”

“She helped us just a few weeks ago on a case.”

“Could have been a way to keep us distracted, unsuspicious.”

“Alex.”

“Uh, Supergirl.”

“Let me talk to her.”

“Because you’re so good at believing anything but the best in people.”

“At least let me try?”

“Fine.”

Maggie’s head swiveled back and forth, following the exchange like a tennis match, her gaze narrowing with every note of increasing familiarity. The moment Kara left, Maggie nudged Alex. “You two…you a, uh, a thing?”

“A what?”

“I mean, she is sort of a lesbian icon, and I guess…good on you. Right off the bat and all.”

“No!” Alex nearly yelled, sighing at the sound of crumbling concrete from the hallway outside her office. She should have known Kara would stick around to snoop. “No, we, uh, we’re just friends.”

“Do all your friends plan on cornering me to tell me to be nice to you?”

Cringing, Alex raised her voice. “Well hopefully Supergirl knows now not to do that again!”

“She, uh…she’s listening, isn’t she?”

“Probably,” Alex admitted. “Likely not any longer.”

“Weird relationship you two have.”

Alex brushed off the comment, somewhat worried about what Maggie might start to suspect if she thought about it for too much longer. “You want to look into Lex, make sure he’s still in prison with no outside contact? I can take point on Lillian. We’ve uh…it’s a long story as to how I know, but we suspect her involvement with Cadmus.”

“Shit. That probably makes her the best lead then, yeah?”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t want to write anything off just yet. With names, though, maybe those financial records will pan out. I’ve had a few of our more…tech-oriented agents trying to trace the money, but they’ve got it wired everywhere and bouncing all around.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. I can see what I can get a warrant for when it comes to looking into the Luthors’ finances.”

“Yeah, or you know, we can work around things.” Maggie glared at Alex. “Anyway, why did you come by?”

“Oh, right. Well, dinner might be a little cold now, but I also wanted to check in about our visit up to meet Quill.”

Alex followed Maggie across the lab to the back table where she’d dropped off the bag of food, settling in on one of the stools and dragging one of the bags toward herself. “Got more details?” Alex let out a little hum of satisfaction as she bit into a chorizo empanada. “Thanks for this, by the way.”

“Of course.” Maggie took a somewhat daintier bite of her own. “I thought maybe we could drive up Friday after work, then try to meet with him on Saturday. I got off both days this weekend just in case—figure it’s good to be free on Sunday too depending on how cooperative he is.”

“Works for me. And the DEO has some pretty fancy camping gear we can take with us.”

“You mean a lowly cop like me is going to get your fancy ass fed gear?” Maggie teased.

“You have to promise not to eat any donuts in it.”

“Oh come on, Danvers, you can do better than that.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

Alex breath caught in her throat. She hated the way her whole body reacted to Maggie’s taunts, hated that no matter how long it had been, she still hadn’t managed to get a handle on that godforsaken crush. “Whatever. You better not snore.”

“I think you’d know by now if I snored.”

“I—fine.”

“So, uh, should we pack a telescope?”

“What?”

“I just…you said that your family always took one to go stargazing. I though, I don’t know, ignore me. It was stupid.”

Alex wondered how it was possible that the same woman who left her desperately turned on, wishing she could pin her to the wall of her lab and try to make her moan louder than any of the other women she’d ever heard had, could also turn her into a pile of mush that wanted to hug her and hold her close and never let go. “No…no, it’s really sweet.”

Maggie seemed so vulnerable, looking up at Alex through thick lashes. “Really?”

“Yeah. We should definitely bring a telescope. I can—I could show you all my favorite constellations. If you want, I mean.”

“I’d love that.”

\---

“Admit I was right.” Kara held the folder high above Alex’s head, floating several inches in the air to ensure Alex couldn’t reach it with a good jump.

“Fine.”

“Say the words.”

“You were right, Kara. Now give it to me.”

“About?”

“Oh my god, you’re such a child.”

“I’m not hearing you tell me what I was right about.”

“You were right about Lena.”

“Thank you.” Kara dropped back down to the ground, handing over the folder of documents Lena had given to her as Supergirl the night before. “There’s all sorts of financial records, plus some stuff from a private investigator she hired when she suspected someone was siphoning funds and resources out of L-Corp accounts.”

“Any thoughts?”

Kara plopped down into the seat in Alex’s office. “Well, apparently the investigation pointed to some engineer guy. But he was one of the holdovers from back when Lex was in charge—actually, it seems like he’d come in off of Lillian’s personal recommendation, but there was no evidence of his involvement in what Lex did, so Lena couldn’t really fire him.”

“Until now.”

“Yeah. And she did fire him, but she doesn’t think he was doing it for himself.”

“Why?”

Kara shrugged. “Some of the stuff he was skimming off the top of shipments…not really anything worth much out on the market. If it had been cash only, she would have thought it was him, but she thinks he’s part of something bigger.”

“Like with Lillian?”

Kara rubbed at the back of her neck, the smile quickly slipping away. “Um, Lena got a little, uh, upset when I asked about that…”

“I thought she doesn’t get along with her mom.”

“She doesn’t. But apparently suggesting that her mom is helping to drug and basically enslave hundreds of aliens isn’t something friends do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I guess.” 

“I don't know that it helps, but I think I have proof that one of the Luthors was involved.”

“Yeah?” Kara looked distinctly less enthusiastic about that progress than Alex did.

“You're actually the reason I thought to look for it. Remember when you talked about CatCo branding? Well, once you and Maggie figured out that the drug turned the color of the old LuthorCorp logo, I had some of the guys pull out any patent applications Lex had filed while he was in charge.” Kara motioned for Alex to continue. “And that weird inert add-on? It’s a chemical signature that LuthorCorp had patented to mark their products as their own, rather than a generic equivalent. It's totally frivolous and a big waste of money, but right now, it's a huge help.”

“Wow. So does that mean Lex is working on this?”

Alex shook her head, her forehead crinkling. “Not necessarily. There were plenty of people at the company who knew about it, and it was patented back when Lillian was at her most involved.” With a groan, Alex dropped her elbows to the table and her head into her hands. “I just worry that I’m missing something. I want it to be Lillian so fucking badly, you know? I want a reason to make her pay for what she did to Jeremiah. What she tried to do to you!" Kara nodded slowly, trying not to react to the memories of the attempted kidnapping but finding a shudder running through her anyway. "And what if I'm missing something because of it?”

“I get that. But I promise, we’re gonna get something and make sure it sticks.” Sensing the shift in mood, Kara nudged Alex in the side. “Guess with all that work, you probably had another late night, but did you get to do anything fun? Catch up on any shows?”

“Oh, um, Maggie and I had dinner and chatted about the case for a while.”

“What’s going on with you two? You were totally avoiding her again, so I assumed something bad happened.”

Alex blushed a bright shade of pink. “Oh, um, well, you see.” She swallowed heavily. “Remember that one time you were over and we could hear, um, through the wall?”

Kara’s face wrinkled up in disgust. “I can’t believe you’ve been stuck dealing with it for this long.”

“Right, right.” It felt like she couldn’t get enough air, and she busied herself with making sure every paper in the folder she’d been handed was perfectly aligned. “Yeah, so, um, turns out I know my neighbor because, um, she’s Maggie.”

“No!”

“Yeah…”

“Oh, Alex, and you’ve been stuck—”

“Yeah. Or, well, not so much lately.”

Kara tilted her head to the side.

“Once she found out, she stopped, um, doing things at her place. And then her girlfriend broke up with her.”

Kara nodded slowly.

“And apparently, I don’t know, she was talking about how she deserved to be dumped, which totally isn’t true! But she said that she always went running for cases—uh, for cases when she thought I might be there.”

“Alex!” Kara smacked her arm. “That’s huge!”

“I don’t know,” Alex groaned, throwing her hands up in the air. “Because then she didn’t want to talk about it. But now she’s being kinda flirty, and I don’t know what to do with it. And we have coffee together in the mornings on the balcony, and now we’re going camping together, and—”

“Hold up. Slow down. Rewind. What?”

“Which part?”

“Any of it! All of it!”

“Well, the coffee started out when she scared the shit out of me while I was out on my balcony, but then it sort of…turned into a thing? I mean, maybe it’s not a thing yet. It’s only been a couple of times. But it feels like a thing that could be a thing? Does that make sense? God, it totally doesn’t.”

Kara hid a grin behind her hand. “I really, really want to take a video of you like this to show to the new recruits and prove to them that you’re not a badass 24/7.”

“I totally am.”

“Sure you are. Very badass blushing and stuttering and rambling.”

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t. Now what is this camping thing?”

“Oh, remember that alien from the fight club I told you about?”

“Mhm.”

“Apparently he’s gone kind of off the grid, so we’re gonna go camping to go visit him.”

“How far away is it?”

“Like three hours.”

Kara folded her arms over her chest and arched an eyebrow in what Alex thought was getting to be a scarily good impersonation of Cat Grant’s interview technique.

“What?”

“Alex!”

“What?”

“You dummy, a three-hour drive? That’s a one-day trip, easy. Drive up in the morning. Do the interview. Drive back with time to spare.”

“I don’t…”

“She totally wants an excuse to hang out with you.”

“I mean, I don’t know.” Alex thought back on it. “I guess, I did mention that I liked camping. And then she asked if I wanted to bring my telescope because I talked about how Mom and Dad used to bring theirs when they took us as kids.”

“That’s totally a date, Alex!”

“I can’t get my hopes up!”

“Fine, I’ll do it for you.”

Alex groaned.

“So what are you gonna wear?”

“It’s work. I’m just gonna bring my DEO clothes,” Alex replied matter-of-factly.

“Wrong. You should bring those darker jeans of yours—the older pair in case they get dirty. And then maybe bring some of your plaid shirts in case she forgets that you’re a lesbian.”

“That’s pretty stereotypical, don’t ya think?”

“You’re pretty stereotypical,” Kara shot back, sticking her tongue out at Alex, who just rolled her eyes. “Besides, I’m trying to help you here, so you could at least say thank you.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll wear my jeans and plaid.”

“You should also bring stuff for s’mores.”

“How is that going to make it more date-like?”

“I never said it would. But s’mores are delicious.”

Alex couldn’t help but laugh at the earnestness of Kara’s declaration. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You should also get some sleep.”

“I need to figure out this antidote.”

“Tomorrow.”

“I—”

“Tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Alex eventually relented.

\---

The next day, after another morning spent out on the balcony having coffee with Maggie, Alex went right back to it, working straight through lunch until Kara crashed into her lab with an aggravated sigh. “I hear you’re trying to work without breaks again.”

“Can’t afford a break,” Alex mumbled through the pen she had poking out of her mouth.

“You can for food.”

“Ate something.”

“Alex, do I need to call in Maggie?”

That was enough for Alex to stand up and glare at Kara. “She is busy with a job too.”

“Bet she ate lunch.”

“Kara,” Alex sighed. “There have been three more alien attacks—all of them hopped up on this—this Cadmus steroid thing. If I don’t find a way to make this stupid fucking antidote work, people are going to keep getting hurt and turning against aliens. Did you see the spike in anti-alien sentiment?” Kara dipped her head slightly. “It’s not been this high in National City since, uh, for a long time.”

“Since Red K, Alex. I know.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine, really.”

“But don’t you get it? This is why I need to come up with a cure. I don’t want them all to have to go through what you did. And they certainly don’t have a Cat Grant there to spearhead their PR campaign.”

“Well…” Kara trailed off, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth as she thought about it. “I think a big exposé on some terrible scheme to drug aliens and force them to fight while National City’s elite get together and gamble on them might be right up Cat's alley.”

“Please tell me you haven’t told her anything.”

“I haven’t, but you know stories don’t stay hidden for long with her around.”

“Your identity has.”

“Oh, er, yeah. Yeah, totally.”

“Kara. Tell me you didn’t.”

“Look this really isn’t the biggest concern at the moment, okay? So, um, tell me how this is going?”

“We’re coming back to this the moment I have a working antidote.”

“Mhmm, sure.”

Alex rolled her eyes and forced herself to take deep, calming breaths, in through her nose, out through her mouth.

“So…how’s the lab stuff coming?” Kara asked in a tone of forced cheerfulness.

“Well…so far I can either kill everything, including the alien, or do absolutely nothing.”

“Um, so…not well, then?”

“Well both versions work just fine when it’s not all mixed in with alien blood, but the second I try to set it loose against the mutated cells, one version basically just sits there, and the other one goes into attack mode but doesn’t leave anything in its wake.”

“Now, don’t kill me, but have you thought about calling Eliza?”

“So I can prove to her that I can’t do anything right on my own?”

“Alex, this is hardly a one-woman project, and you've made more progress in a short time than anyone else could have. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help. El mayarah, right?”

“I already have to see her for Thanksgiving next week.”

“And what a great way to get the tense bickering out of the way now so that we can have a stress-free holiday for a change?”

Alex closed her eyes. On the one hand, calling her mom in was the very last thing she wanted to do. On the other…she’d never forgive herself if more people and aliens died because she was too much of a baby to deal with her mother for an extra day. After all, she had been trying since last year, and their phone calls had gotten less tense as the months slipped by. “She’s staying with you this time.”

“Deal.”

\---

The next morning, Kara swooped into the DEO with Eliza, bringing her right to Alex’s lab and backing out only at the sight of Alex and Maggie standing shoulder-to-shoulder, smiling and blushing as they looked over documents.

Of course, Alex heard their laughing and chatting from the doorway, jumping back from Maggie the second she saw her mom.

“Sorry! We can, um, come back when you’re ready.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Alex mumbled. “Um, Maggie, this is, uh, my mom. Mom, this is Maggie.”

“Very nice to meet you, Maggie.” Eliza extended a hand, shaking Maggie’s.

“It’s great to meet you too…” Maggie hesitated, wondering if the older Danvers was a doctor as well.

“Eliza is fine.”

“Right.”

Alex frowned at the tension in Maggie’s jaw.

“I hear you’ve been a great help on this case.”

“Oh, uh, I don’t know. I mean, Alex is the one who’s been working day and night on this cure. She’s the one who even figured out that there was a drug in the first place.”

Alex hated herself for the swell of happiness she felt at Maggie’s words and the proud smile she got from her mother. “Maggie’s selling herself short. Without her we never would have gotten a handle on half of the case.” Alex glared at Kara, who was miming a gagging motion behind Eliza. “Anyway, um, I’m just gonna walk Maggie out. I’ll be right back, Mom.” 

“Take your time, sweetie.”

Once they were outside, Maggie looked up at Alex. “Supergirl knows your mom?”

“Oh, it’s—like I said, we’re close.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, I’ll, uh, let you know if we get anywhere before we have to leave tonight.”

“Sounds good.”

But Alex didn’t leave, lingering in the doorway and scuffing her boots across the pavement.

“Got something on your mind, Danvers?”

“I, um, I might try to tell her. My mom, I mean.”

“Yeah?”

Alex nodded. “I don’t want to hide part of myself, you know? And I think with your help, I’m learning to see it as my new normal, as something that’s part of me—makes me who I am. Like, yeah, maybe it’s not what she expected me to do or what she thought my life would look like, but that doesn’t have to make it a bad thing.”

A soft smile tugged at the corners of Maggie's mouth. “I’m really proud of you, Alex.”

“It’s not—I mean, you’ve already been out. I know it’s not that big of a deal or anything.”

“Hey, don’t say that. Comparisons will only drive ya crazy. So I’m gonna be over here, being proud of you. And if you end up not telling her today? That’s cool too. And if ya do? That’s also great. I, uh, you know”—Maggie shrugged—“I’m here for you if you need me.”

“Thanks.”

“Now get in there and science it up and maybe come out!”

Chuckling, Alex waved Maggie away. By the time she made it back downstairs, she felt lighter, like she could do it.

“Kara’s gone?” Alex peered around the lab, half-expecting Kara to jump out from some corner.

“She said something about Snapper yelling for her.”

“Ah…sounds about right.”

“I do wish he would treat her better.” Alex braced herself for some reprimand about how she should be doing a better job of policing Kara’s boss, only it never came. Instead, Eliza asked, “So that was Maggie?”

Alex felt her shoulders tense but reminded herself to breathe, tried to count this as a good segue into the conversation she wanted to have. Sure, okay, she probably wouldn’t have chosen this early in the morning, but maybe it was good. Bite the bullet. Grab the bull by the horns. All those other slogans that got printed on cheesy office posters. “That was.”

“You two have been working together an awful lot…”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, she’s a really great detective.”

“I’m sure. I can’t imagine you willingly working with anyone but the best.”

Alex let out a quiet murmur of assent as she bent over her samples. “Yeah, we, um, we’ve gotten to be friends too.” She hated every second, hated how young and weak the fear made her feel, hated how fast her heart was pounding in her chest, hated the way her ribs suddenly felt too tight, like her lungs couldn’t possibly get enough air in them. “And, um, she's really, uh, she's helped me a lot. Because I…I'm not…” Alex trailed off, fumbling for words that refused to come. 

“Oh, Alex, sweetheart,” Eliza sighed.

With a deep breath, Alex spun around, looking up to the ceiling as she tried to keep tears from falling. It was certainly too early for that.

“You don’t owe me anything, Alex. But…know that I’m here whenever you’re ready. If you want that.”

Alex nodded, steeling her nerves.  _Off like a bandaid_. “I’m gay, Mom.”

The tight hug was, perhaps, predictable, even if it still took Alex by surprise, but the tears? Those she most definitely did not expect welling up in her eyes before slipping out and down her cheeks.

“I’m proud of you.”

“Apparently everyone is proud of me these days.” Sniffling, Alex let out a watery laugh. “And here I thought I was supposed to be the one reclaiming pride or whatever.”

Eliza pulled back, a smile softening her features, and she reached out to tuck a lock of Alex’s hair behind her ear. “Can I assume Maggie played some role in this?”

Alex groaned. “Apparently I’m also the farthest thing from subtle.”

“It’s not just you.” Alex took another step back, looking up at her mom in confusion. “I can see the way she looks at you. And who wouldn’t like you?”

“You have to say that,” Alex huffed. “You’re my mom.”

“Mothers also have a way of knowing these sorts of things.”

Brushing it off, unwilling to get her hopes up, Alex turned back to the vials. “Well, luckily you also know about alien medicine.”

And then it was back to work with a somewhat lighter heart and a small flicker of hope burning deep in her chest. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See you back here on Thursday for the first of the two camping trip chapters!


	11. Chapter 11

After countless assurances from J’onn that the DEO would survive, that Eliza would keep working on the antidote, and that they would call her if anything happened, Alex packed up the trunk of one of the DEO vehicles with the bags of camping supplies she’d pulled out of storage, her own backpack stuffed with what Kara had deemed appropriate, “date-worthy clothing,” and one of the mid-range telescopes.

Only a few minutes later, Maggie arrived at the parking garage, a worn duffel bag slung over her back and a small cooler of food she’d picked up in her free hand. “Ready for some good old fashioned camping, Danvers?”

“Can’t wait.” Even as Alex rolled her eyes, the flutter in her chest reminded her that she was completely serious as well. “Need a hand?”

“I got it.” Maggie hefted her things into the back of the van. “Now which one of us gets dibs on driving?”

“It’s a DEO vehicle.” Alex clutched the keys more tightly.

“And I’m excellent driver.” Maggie held out her hand and wiggled her fingers.

“But you’re not a DEO employee.”

“Aww, c’mon, I’m a DEO liaison. If I get all your paperwork, shouldn’t I get some of your perks too?”

With a laugh and a shake of her head, Alex pulled open the driver’s side door and hopped up into the seat. “You’ll get the benefit of a DEO agent’s protection in the woods tonight.”

Still grumbling, Maggie pulled herself up into the van and immediately reached for the aux cord to plug in her phone. “If you get to drive, I get to pick the music.”

“Seriously? You better pick something good.”

Maggie let out a hum of understanding, sifting through her music library and finally settling on her own personal favorites as they pulled out into the street.

As the opening notes of “One Week” came on, Alex tilted her head to the side. “How’d you know?”

“Know what?”

“The Barenaked Ladies—they’re my favorite.”

With a snort of laughter, Maggie eyed Alex. “Yeah, you and pretty much every lesbian.”

Alex turned in her seat to purse her lips and glare at Maggie. “Did you really put on this song just to make that joke?”

“No…though it’s a good one—you have to give me that.”

“Barely.”

“I’m taking it. But no, they’re my favorites.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“You’re one of the few people I know who agrees with me that they’re worthy of being a favorite.”

“I suppose we can’t fault others for lacking our great tastes.”

Concerned as Alex was with getting around a city bus that she knew would stop every few feet, puffing out big clouds of smoke and making it impossible to keep the windows open, she didn’t quite think before replying. “Don’t know that you can say you have great taste when you voluntarily eat vegan ice cream.”

“So you’re willing to admit to seeing me that day, huh?”

Alex felt her muscles twitch, as if preparing to flee the inside of a moving vehicle. When she glanced up at Maggie out of the corner of her eye, she found her grinning and tilting her head to the side like she knew exactly what she was doing. “I, um, maybe…”

“Knew you’d be good in a firefight from that day on, though.”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen anyone hit the ground so fast.”

Alex could feel her cheeks warming and distracted herself with maneuvering around the lanes of traffic until she’d gotten through a few blocks of congestion that seemed to have no cause at all. Once they’d made it out of the city, Alex rolled the windows down a little lower, enjoying the cool breeze before remembering that she wasn’t alone. “You cold?”

“I’m from Nebraska, and I normally drive a motorcycle. I think I can handle a little bit of wind.”

“Excuse me for trying to be considerate,” Alex huffed.

“Very chivalrous. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well.” Alex’s lips twitched, and she drummed her fingers against the wheel.

“How, uh, how were things with your mom?”

“Oh, they were actually good. I told her.”

“Yeah? How’d she take it?”

“Good. Lot less, uh, denial than I had.”

Maggie let out a quiet laugh. “That’s great. But don’t, you know, beat yourself up about it. You spent a lot of years convincing yourself of one thing. It makes sense that you didn’t immediately change your mind.”

“I guess.” Alex shrugged. “Hey, you never told me how you came out. If, uh, if I can ask. I don’t…sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You’re good, Alex. I, um”—Maggie swallowed heavily, her fingers dropping down to pick at a thread coming loose on one of her buttons—“well, I also had a best friend in high school. Eliza. Um, Eliza Wilke.”

Thinking back to Maggie’s visceral reaction when her mom introduced herself and a few of the stray comments she’d made over the past few months, Alex felt the pieces shift into place. “If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to.”

“No, I, um, it’s been a while, you know? I just, well, we were freshman in high school. I had a few friends from middle school—mainly from the soccer team. But we weren’t like, friend-friends. It was more, I got invited to their birthday parties because the whole team did.” Alex nodded in understanding; it had been like that with Kara, at least at first. “And one or two were better than others, but still, my family hadn’t been in Nebraska forever like theirs had. I didn’t look like they did. I didn’t know the same people or go to the same pool as them.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Yeah, I don’t—it was fine. I never wanted to stay in Nebraska anyway.” Maggie forced herself to focus back in on the story. “Anyway, the high school brought together a few of the closest middle schools, so we got some new kids. And Eliza and I just…clicked. And soon we were hanging out almost every day.” Maggie closed her eyes as she reminisced, trying to pry out the better memories from all that had come later. “We’d sit for hours in her basement and watch scary movies curled up under a blanket together and cringe at the taste of the beer and cigarettes we stole from her dad’s stash.”

“Future cop, breaking all the rules.”

Maggie rolled her eyes and shoved at Alex’s arm. “At some point I realized…I don’t know. I felt something for her. The thing I was supposed to be feeling for boys.”

“Yeah…sounds familiar.” In retrospect, it was so easy to see. The way Alex’s stomach had fluttered when Vicki pulled her in for a tight hug or held up the covers and asked her to cuddle. The way her eyes had always been drawn to beautiful women in the clubs back in the days when she’d tossed back shot after shot to forget how poorly things in her life were going. She’d called the former proof of friendship, nothing more, and the latter jealousy, as if those women must surely have been doing better than her. But by the time Lucy was talking to her, by the time Maggie’s arms were curling around her stomach and holding her close, her last wall of defenses and excuses crumbled under the weight of years of repressed evidence.

“We had this stupid Valentine’s Day dance at school, and I wrote Eliza a card asking her if she wanted to go with me. She, um…” Maggie trailed off, her breathing labored and shaky.

“Maggie, you don’t—you don’t have to tell me.”

“No, it’s fine. I just—she gave the card to her parents. They called my parents. They weren’t okay with it, so they kicked me out, and I ended up living with my aunt until I left for college,” Maggie rushed out in a single breath.

“Oh, Maggie, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that.”

With a sniff and a loud exhale, Maggie wiped away the few tears that had collected in the corners of her eyes. “No…no, they don’t.”

“But you didn’t either.” Alex glanced over at Maggie, her lips pursing at the sight of the small shrug of Maggie’s shoulders. “You didn’t,” Alex repeated, reaching one hand out to rest it on top of Maggie’s. “And, I don’t know, it’s a whole lot of years after the fact, but I’m—I’m here. I mean, I can’t fix anything, but I just…I know that you are a wonderful, caring, loving person, and you deserve so much better, okay? And I can’t offer much, but I’m here for you.”

“Thank you,” Maggie whispered, squeezing Alex’s hand tightly.

The conversation slowly shifted to lighter topics, and Alex missed the warmth of Maggie’s hand the moment she let Alex’s go, nudging it back to the wheel with an admonishment to “use both hands for highway driving, Danvers.” 

Over the course of the drive, they played a few rounds of 20 Questions and a terribly unproductive game of I Spy. Maggie broke out the snacks around the one hour mark. At some point they shifted from Maggie’s music library to the radio, and Maggie turned the volume all the way up when she stumbled upon “I Will Survive” while surfing through the channels.

Alex swore at some point they’d both been belting it out right along with Gloria Gaynor, but by the end of the song, it was only her, and she could feel embarrassment bubbling up in her chest at the realization. But when she glanced over to see if Maggie was making fun of her, she found Maggie staring, her mouth gaping and her eyes wide. “I, um…sorry, I thought we were singing along.”

“Holy shit, Danvers. Warn a girl when you’re gonna sing like that,” Maggie finally managed.

“I, um…”

“That was amazing.”

“Oh! Oh, uh, thanks.” Alex rubbed at the back of her neck and glanced out her window.

“Any other hidden talents you want to tell me about?”

“Um…I surf?”

Alex was met with the sounds of coughing and spluttering as Maggie choked on her sip of water.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine!” But her voice sounded a bit strangled, even as she continued to insist everything was fine.

Alex’s eyebrows pulled together as she glanced over at Maggie. She swore she could almost see a pink hue staining Maggie’s cheeks.

“I just, um, is it…were you like…was it like Blue Crush at all?”

“What? Did I ever have a steamy relationship with someone I taught to surf and nearly die under massive waves?” Alex figured then wasn’t the time to mention that she  _had_ nearly died once or twice in the months after her dad’s death—or presumed death was more accurate these days, she supposed—pulled under the choppy surf on cold mornings that were early enough to almost still count as nighttime.

“I more meant the, um, outfits.”

Alex let out a cackling laugh. “Oh my god, you totally watched that movie for the half-naked women, didn’t you?”

“Excuse you, I like to support female-led films and women in athletics.”

“Yeah. And let me guess, you’re a big supporter of beach volleyball as well?”

Maggie snorted. “I had more fun with the field hockey team in college, actually.”

“Of course you did.”

“It can’t be helped that their star recruit lived next door and got curious.”

“Oh, so this is a pattern, then? A tactical housing decision?”

“Depends.” Maggie lowered her voice and fluttered her eyelashes. “Is it working?”

“Fuck off.” Alex was delighted to find that her voice didn’t waver at all, even as her heart hammered in her chest and made thinking difficult.

“Mm yes, well, we know how loud that can get.”

It was Alex’s turn to splutter then. She eventually cracked the window, letting the roar of the wind as they flew down the highway drag her back into the present as the air cooled off her skin, which suddenly felt much too warm. It wasn’t as though she’d  _actively_  thought about all that went on beyond the wall—at least not since finding out who lived there—but her mind loved a good puzzle, and having all the pieces…well, it sort of naturally drifted, as it were—drifted to the nights when things seemed to have gone on for so long, to the pleading and the praise, to the…well, the frequency really. And none of those had ever been things that were appealing before, but the idea of any of them, let alone all of them, with Maggie… That was another story entirely.

A phone call from Kara broke the tension.

The phone blared from the center console, and Maggie grabbed it for Alex, smiling at the photo of her and Kara grinning up at the camera with matching ice cream cones.

Kara’s voice crackled through the car’s speakers, and Alex preempted any embarrassing or revealing statements with a loud declaration that she was on speaker phone.

“Oh…cool. I just, um, Eliza got back to my apartment. She told me to tell you that she’s running a longer test on the version you two were working on when you left, but she said that the early results looked promising.”

Maggie’s eyes narrowed, and she stared intently at the car speakers.

“That’s great!”

“Yeah,” Kara agreed. “How’s the trip?”

“Good. We’re actually getting pretty close now.”

“Ah yeah, I can tell. You’re coming in and out.”

“Sorry. We’ll have the walkie talkies if there are emergencies and we can’t get service, okay?”

“We’ve got it handled, okay? Promise. Enjoy your da—time away.”

“Still work!” Alex declared loudly, clearing her throat. “Anyway, uh, I should go. Talk to you later, Kara.”

“Bye, Alex!”

Alex felt her shoulders relax once the call disconnected, and she sank back into her seat, focusing on getting the SUV around a few of the windy roads the GPS was telling her to take.

“Your sister knows about the DEO?”

“Hmm?”

“Isn’t she a journalist?”

Alex’s grip on the wheel tightened. “Hmm?”

“You freaked out when you realized I knew about the DEO. And you would never put someone in a position like that unless…” Maggie trailed off, and Alex swore she could see the clues stitching themselves together in Maggie’s mind. “That voice…your sister…she’s Supergirl.”

“I don’t—”

“Danvers, I’m not about to tell anyone, okay?”

“I just—”

“I’ve been wondering about the weird relationship you two have for a while now, but sisters—that makes sense. And for someone who didn’t like many aliens, you used to get so goddam defensive whenever she came up.” Maggie shook her head. “At first I thought it was because she works with you guys, and then I was pretty convinced you two were dating, but this…this is definitely a better explanation.”

Alex groaned. “You know there’s about double the amount of paperwork for this as there was for finding out about the DEO, right?”

“I’d expect nothing less.” After a few minutes of silence, Maggie turned around in her seat, propping her head in her hands. “What was it like growing up with an alien sister?”

“What?”

“I mean, I’ve got alien friends—and exes—but for the most part, the ones I meet or get to know or whatever are adults. They’ve done a fair amount of intergalactic travel. A lot of them have already been on Earth for a while. What was it like having a kid sort of…crash land in your life?”

“Um…honestly, I was pretty bitter at first. And I know—I know that sounds so awful.”

“Not really,” Maggie interjected.

“What?”

“I’m assuming you guys didn’t exactly know she was coming, right?”

“Well, no…she kind of”—Alex lifted her hand and dropped it down—“fell from the stars.”

“Right. So it’s not like you had any time to prepare. How old were you?”

“Freshman in high school.”

“So you’d gone for what? 14 years as an only child. And then boom, suddenly you’ve got a little sister that’s kind of like a god on Earth?”

“Yeah.” Alex voice was nearly a whisper, and she tried to shove down the pangs of guilt and remorse for how awful she had been to Kara at first. Even when she was the one helping her, even when she was crawling under the table to reassure her that the popcorn machine wasn’t a weapon or telling her things would be okay, there were darker emotions swirling inside her—bitterness, jealousy, resentment. Of course, with enough time, those had faded. She’d glimpsed the depth of loss, of pain behind the awkward fumbling and overly bright smiles. She’d come to learn that Kara’s powers weren’t always something to envy, that they could bring danger and constant scrutiny as well. But the beginning…well, she’d never quite forgiven herself for that.

“I’d probably have been a little jealous.”

“Nuh-uh. You’re too good.”

Maggie snorted. “Look, no matter what shit went down later that year, I could still be a bratty, hormonal teenager. No one escapes those years unscathed.”

“I guess.”

“And you’re obviously close now.”

“Oh yeah. These days it’s different. We had moments earlier, but we really got close my senior year of high school, then we were sort of inseparable. I, uh, pulled away a little while I was in grad school, then I couldn’t tell her about the DEO, but once she came out as Supergirl and we got over the whole keeping secrets for years thing, we’ve ended up closer than ever.”

“I’m glad you two have each other.” Maggie smiled wistfully up at Alex.

“Yeah…yeah, me too.” After a moment, Alex asked, “So, uh, where do we go from here?”

It was only then that Maggie realized they had arrived, the SUV easily trundling over the dirt roads that led to the campsite. “Oh, uh, park in that lot there.” Maggie gestured to their left, and Alex followed her instructions, pulling into a spot two away from one of the only cars in the area. “Then we have lot number 8.”

“Sounds good. Suppose there’s not much demand for camping this time of year, huh?”

Maggie shrugged. “Guess it’s a little cold. Gets dark kind of early.”

“Yeah…” Alex glanced up at the starry sky, grateful that they had plenty of good lights from the DEO to use while they set everything up.

Set up ended up going much more smoothly than Alex expected. She and Maggie seemed to move in sync without much coordination required; she couldn’t remember things going that easily with anyone, save for Kara, and that was different—she had superpowers that made things like avoiding collisions a bit easier. But Maggie seemed to anticipate Alex’s needs and movements, and on more than one occasion Alex had to tamp down on inappropriate thoughts about where else that level of coordination might play well.

Once they had a fire going and had put away the trash from their late dinner, Alex began setting up the telescope, only asking if Maggie was too tired after she was already done.

“Nah, I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

“Me too,” Alex admitted, her voice quiet.

They spent the next hour taking turns peering into the telescope as Alex shifted it to look at different constellations and get a blurry view of some of the planets, insisting that Maggie really needed to use the DEO’s high-powered telescope at some point to get a better look.

“How do you know so much about the constellations?” Maggie asked, her words barely above a whisper in the still of the night.

“Oh, uh, my dad…he taught them all to me when I was little.” Alex’s mouth twisted up into a sad smile. “It started on nights when I couldn’t sleep. I used to think I was so sneaky, tip-toeing downstairs to see what my parents were doing. My mom, uh, she was working on her doctorate, so she’d be busy doing her research and writing and stuff. And my dad was busy too, but he could keep more of his stuff in the office.” Maggie hummed in acknowledgement. "On nights when he noticed me, he started taking me out onto the front porch to look into the telescope until I could barely keep my eyes open, then he’d carry me back to bed.” Thinking back on it, Alex chuckled softly. “Of course, it didn’t take him long to realize that I started forcing myself to stay awake, and then it just kind of became part of the nightly routine.”

“He sounds great.”

“He was.”

Maggie tilted her head to the side, the unspoken question clear.

“He, um, he died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Alex.”

“It’s fine. Or, well, I don’t know. Maybe, it’s a long story.”

“Well…if you want someone to listen, we’ve got time.”

Alex let out a long, low breath. “He might be alive.”

“Oh?”

Alex scuffed at the dirt with her boots, walking over toward the fire and lowering herself onto one of the wooden benches. A moment later, Maggie sat down next to Alex, her presence doing more to warm Alex than the crackling fire. “He, uh, remember how I mentioned that I got sent to Cadmus? Or, well, almost?”

“Not something a girl really forgets, Alex.”

“Right. Well, um, when I was rescued, J’onn had to erase the guard’s memories.”

“Oh, yeah, forgot that you know a Martian too.”

“Too?” While Alex knew the news about J’onn had been broadcasted widely after the Red K incident, she figured she would have seen if any other Martians had come out of the woodwork in the aftermath.

Maggie brushed off the question. “Later. I promise.”

“Fine,” Alex eventually relented. “Well, while he was looking through the guy’s memories, he saw my dad—alive.”

“Where?”

Alex rubbed her palms up and down her thighs and sucked in a shaky breath. “Cadmus.”

Maggie was quiet for a while. “We’ll get him back, Alex. We’ll find them—all of them—and we’ll make Cadmus pay for what they’ve done.”

“Hopefully.”

“Danvers, there’s no way a woman like you lets them get away. I believe in you—in us.”

Emotions welled up in Alex’s chest and threatened to burst forth when Maggie looped an arm around Alex’s waist, pulling her in closer. “Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See ya back here for the second half of the camping trip and my favorite chapter this Sunday!


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Sunday! Hope you enjoy the chapter that became my personal favorite

Alex slept fitfully all night, her body acutely aware of Maggie’s close proximity, their sleeping bags placed side-by-side in the tent. Every time she drifted off, her dreams dragged her into a reality so similar and yet so different from the one she was in. They were still out camping, still huddled in a DEO tent after a night spent looking at the stars, but their sleeping bags were zipped together, her body wrapped up in Maggie’s, their bare limbs tangled together, her nose buried in Maggie’s neck beneath the curtain of thick dark hair. Each time she woke, she was struck with a pang of guilt and a flood of wanting.

By the time the sun rose, Alex decided she might as well get up and get breakfast ready—make herself useful somehow. The steady work of starting a fire and boiling water and digging through their supplies slowed her racing heart and settled her thoughts back into the realm of the mundane. 

Maggie joined her not too much later, murmuring her thanks when Alex had a cup of coffee and a large, only slightly burnt pancake ready for her.

“How’d you sleep?” Alex asked, her legs tucked into her chest and her head resting on her knees as she stared into the fire, its flames licking up the small twigs and crackling around the balled up newspaper she tossed in every so often. 

“Can’t complain.”

“No terrible neighbor to wake you?” Alex teased.

“Hmm, no. Just an excellent neighbor who made me coffee.”

“Figured you could use it in case I kept you up at all.”

“Oh no, did you not sleep well?”

Alex shrugged, not quite holding eye contact. “Not your fault—new surroundings, that’s all.”

“Yeah…hard to turn off those instincts sometimes.”

Alex let out a vague noise of assent, then returned her attention to the dregs of coffee left in her cup. “So…when are we headed out to meet Quill?”

“Figured the earlier, the better. It’s a bit of a hike—gotta get away from the campsite.”

“Sounds good.” After draining her cup, Alex set to work putting out the fire and packing up the food she’d pulled down to make breakfast.

Maggie rummaged through her bag and found the map she’d printed before they left, going over the route to Quill’s makeshift cabin yet again until she felt settled. “I’m gonna change, okay?” Maggie yelled before ducking into the tent.

Alex tried to keep her attention on the dying embers of the fire, tried not to think about the fact that Maggie was a thin layer of fabric away, stripping down to little more than underwear. And she would never look, would never violate Maggie’s privacy like that, but when she turned around to put away supplies, she couldn’t help but notice the shadowy outline of Maggie against the side of the tent, her body backlit by the sun, casting a perfect black silhouette against the beige of the DEO-issued tent.

The pull of the zipper made Alex jump, and she explained it away as a rush to get ready herself, which she did with a level of speed that didn’t allow her time to acknowledge all the physical signs of her own arousal. She was an adult. She could handle being in close proximity to the first person she’d ever been truly attracted to (and admitted said attraction to) in almost three decades.

Eventually they made it down to the path, and then Alex’s attention was occupied with directions and periodic reminders to check the compass and warnings about raised tree roots and low-hanging branches. The hike was far from easy, and both women found themselves slightly out of breath and sweaty by the time they crested the largest hill. 

“Water?” Alex offered, swinging her bag around from her back to her chest as she fished around for the bottles she had grabbed on their way out.

“Please.”

They stood in comfortable silence for a few minutes, sipping at their water and letting their heart rates slow.

“Nice to have someone who can keep up,” Maggie remarked as she handed her water back to Alex.

“You make it sound like you’re the faster one of the two of us,” Alex huffed.

“Well…I am the one in front.”

“Because you’re the one with the map!”

“Sounds like an excuse.” Maggie bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling at the squawk of indignation.

“Please. The DEO’s training program makes whatever you cops do look like a kindergarten gym class.”

“We don’t get relief teams for our relief teams, Danvers. When I’m out there chasing down an alien it’s just me, the alien, and one or two guys for backup if I’m lucky. We have stamina for days.”

Alex swallowed back all the inappropriate remarks about where she might like a demonstration of that stamina. “So what? You chase a rogue alien or two down the street. I spar with Supergirl. Tell me, Sawyer, you ever go toe-to-toe with a Kryptonian?”

Maggie spluttered, her eyes going wide and her jaw slack. “I, um, like, regularly?”

“Mhmm. Who do you think taught her how to fight?”

“Fuck.”

Missing the way Maggie’s eyes had darkened, Alex simply smirked back at her. “So are you really gonna stick with that line about having more stamina?”

Maggie cleared her throat a few times before regaining some of her earlier swagger. “Guess we’ll have to spar one day to find out.”

And oh, that was an image Alex didn’t know she needed, but now it was all she could think about. The pull of taut muscles flexing and rippling beneath heated skin. The thin sheen of sweat glistening on muscular shoulders. The give and take around the ring as they learned to read each other. The huffs of air as their breathing grew ragged. The feel of having Maggie pinned beneath her. The idea of letting Maggie pin her… Alex didn’t need a mirror to know her cheeks were stained a bright red, and she could feel the pulse she’d finally gotten back to its resting rate speeding up once more. “Well, we, uh, maybe when we’re back.”

“Maybe.” And for once there was no smirk, no teasing remark on the tip of Maggie’s tongue. Had Alex known to look for it, she would have seen her own expression mirrored back at her—the hunger, the want, the just barely suppressed need.

Instead, she cleared her throat and suggested they get moving again.

The last leg of their hike was the easiest by far, and before long they were at the decrepit cabin where Quill had been staying. The smell of decaying food hit them as they approached, and Alex tried not to gag as they stepped around the garbage pile a few yards away from the door.

Maggie knocked three times on the door, standing with her hands up and her face visible as she called out, “Dollywood,” the code word M’gann had given to them to establish their identities.

The use of the code word didn’t stop Quill from meeting them with an old, chipped baseball bat clutched in one hand and the spikes on his arms out in full force.

“M’gann sent us,” Maggie explained, her voice measured, steady, quiet. “We’re here to help.”

Alex fought her instinct to pull out a weapon of her own. If he came any closer to Maggie, though…

“Let me see your bags,” Quill demanded.

With slow movements, Maggie slipped one arm out from the backpack, then the other. She unzipped it and handed it over, watching as Quill sifted through the contents of her bag, finally handing it back with a satisfied huff.

“Now yours.”

Alex’s movements were somewhat jerkier as she forced herself to ignore all the DEO training that told her she was making herself much too vulnerable.

After a few minutes of searching, Quill took a step back, seemingly satisfied, and motioned for them to come inside. He waited for Alex and Maggie to enter first, never turning his back on them.

Once the door was shut behind them, Maggie extended her hand, palm up. “I’m Maggie Sawyer. I’m a detective with the NCPD.” He nodded. “And this is Alex Danvers. She’s been helping me out with a case these past few months.” Alex bit her tongue, knowing better than to admit to being DEO with someone scared out of his mind but still resenting the language of ‘helping out.’

“M’gann”—Quill sniffed, his muscles tightening then relaxing once more—“she said you were trying to stop Roulette.”

“Roulette and the people she’s working with,” Maggie added, her voice calm, even-keeled. Even Alex felt herself relaxing.

“Why do you need me?”

Maggie looked over at Alex, nodding slowly. The plan was new, but after long talks with J’onn at the DEO, then a private meeting with M’gann, they’d decided that asking someone as twitchy and nervous as Quill to testify against Roulette as their first request was too much.

“Well,” Alex began, trying to modulate her voice in the same way Maggie had, trying to remember what it had been like when Kara first arrived. “In order to arrest Roulette, to get some charge that has a chance at sticking, we need to catch her in the act.”

“And?”

“You’re scheduled to fight still, right?”

The spikes along his arms that had receded while Maggie spoke shot out once more, gleaming even in the low light of the cabin. “What about it?”

“We just need to know when and where the fight will take place,” Maggie interjected, placing a comforting hand on Alex’s shoulder. “We’re, uh, not exactly on the guest list. We know who’s going to be fighting but not the exact date or the location. Do you get that information?”

After a moment, Quill inclined his head—just the briefest of movements. “Few days before.”

“Do you think you could give that to us?”

Quill nodded once more. “How?”

Alex twitched, thinking better of moving without giving prior warning. “I have a burner phone for you. I’m going to get it from my bag, okay?”

He gave a jerky nod of his head, his gaze never leaving Alex as she lowered her bag and rummaged through it before pulling out a small black flip phone. “We got someone totally unrelated to this case to buy it out of state. The only number in it is another burner phone that we have, okay?”

Quill accepted the phone warily, turning it over in his hands a few times and checking the contacts before putting it in his pocket. “That all?”

“Well…there’s one more thing.” Maggie took a deep breath. “We know about the drugs.”

“I don’t take ’em!” Quill barked.

“No! I know!” Maggie let him take a few deep breaths before she continued. “I know you don’t. That’s why we’re coming to you.”

“Okay.”

Alex cut in then. “The drug…it does more than just make them stronger.” Quill nodded in understanding, a shiver running through his frame at the memory of going head-to-head with a Syvillian jacked up on the stuff several weeks prior. “We think—we have reason to believe that the aliens who take enough of the drug are being used by someone working with Roulette.” Quill remained quiet, which Alex took as a sign to keep going. “With the help of another scientist, I devised an antidote that reverses the effects of that drug.” She’d gotten the message that morning that the second round of trials all went well, and even though they were still waiting for their longer term tests to conclude before administering it to anyone they had in containment, Alex felt confident about the progress they’d made. “Do you think—are there any fighters who are still…who might want the antidote?”

Quill shook his head. “Changes them. They just want more.”

Alex sighed. They had expected it, even if she’d let herself hold out a sliver of hope. “Okay. When we come to the fight, we’re gonna have some of the antidote. Do you know if we’d be able to get to any of the fighters before it starts?”

“Sometimes. Depends on who’s fighting.”

Maggie nodded in understanding. “Some of them are in cages?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Maggie took a deep breath. “So you’ll call us when you find out when and where it’ll be?”

“You can’t tell them I helped.”

“We won’t,” Alex promised. “But if all goes well, the people like Roulette who would hurt you for telling—they’ll be behind bars.”

“Thank you, Quill. We’re going to keep you safe.”

Before Alex and Maggie could leave, Quill jumped in front of them. “I want immunity.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed. “For what?”

“I helped you. Promise me I won’t go to jail for the fights.”

“I—that’s not—Roulette is the one in charge there.” Maggie and Quill both fixed Alex with a hard glare, lips pursed, as if to say,  _You know that’s not how it works_. “Fine. Immunity for fighting.”

“And for anything that happened because of the fights.”

“What aren’t you telling us?” Alex demanded, stepping forward until Maggie drew her back.

“We need to know, okay? If we don’t know in advance, it’s going to make it harder to prove that this agreement was binding down the line.”

“The Syvillian.”

Alex’s brow furrowed as she thought back. “You killed him.”

“It was self-defense! I’m telling you, he took those drugs. You don’t understand.”

“We know he did,” Maggie cut in. “We know he had taken the steroids.”

“What?”

“We knew that. We know he was fighting in Roulette’s matches. We’ve been up against other aliens pumped full of the drug—we know sometimes a fatal shot is the only way to stay alive.”

Quill swallowed heavily, his shoulders still tense.

“We promise you won’t face legal action for that or the fighting, okay? We appreciate your help.”

With a few final goodbyes, Alex and Maggie slipped back outside, letting Quill check the surroundings to ensure no one was watching before allowing them to leave.

They walked the first hundred or so yards in silence, finally relaxing in the cover of the woods.

“Think he’ll call?” Alex asked, breaking the silence.

“I…I think so. He’s scared, but he wants out more than anything. And I think he trusts us—at least enough to let us help.”

Alex nodded slowly. “You were amazing in there.”

“I didn’t do anything more than talk to him.”

“But you knew just what to say, how to act, what to do to make sure he knew we weren’t a threat.”

“Yeah, well”—Maggie shrugged—“you learn things along the way. Hostage negotiations, possible jumpers, armed robbers that you can tell are just kids who don’t really want to throw the rest of their lives away… We don’t all have a Supergirl that can jump in if things go wrong.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I, uh, there’s definitely a subtlety there.”

Maggie’s mouth curled up into a smile. “Yeah…meanwhile you guys storm in guns blazing.”

“I—”

“It’s not always a bad thing!” Maggie chuckled. “I’m just thinking about Scorcher. You looked like you were carrying a fuckin’ bazooka on your shoulder.”

Alex let herself laugh at that. “Building still had old lead paint—we were going in blind.”

“Sure you’re not just overcompensating…maybe for the lack of stamina.”

“That’s it. Come on, we’re racing back.”

“What?”

“You heard me. It’s pretty much a straight shot back to camp now. You’re so convinced you’re fitter than I am, so prove it.”

Maggie’s eyes darted around, and finally she gave a nod. “Meet you at the bottom.”

And then they were off, and Alex let the sheer thrill of exhilaration carry her and keep her from staring at Maggie’s ass as she deftly flung herself over roots that had erupted through the soil and squatted low to get down a particularly steep section of rock.

When Maggie beat her to the bottom by a foot or two, Alex declared the race all the way back to the campsite—after all, they were testing endurance—and flung herself forward, trying to channel the drive she’d had during the two seasons of track she did because Vicki hadn’t wanted to run alone.

Alex ended up beating Maggie by several long strides, and even though they were both doubled over, chests heaving with the effort of strenuous exercise, Maggie panted, “Not over yet.”

“What now?” Alex wheezed, wondering why it was that she could chase after aliens for three times the amount of distance as she’d run without being this out of breath. Then again, the laughter and the thrill of it all probably weren’t helping.

Maggie considered it for a moment before yelling, “Boats! Kayak race!”

It was ridiculous and absurd, but Alex wasn’t about to say no.

They jogged all the way to the lake, then down to four separate boat rental stands until they found the only one that stayed open year round, throwing down cash for two single kayaks and accepting the life jackets that the person at the counter pushed toward them without any intention of wearing them.

“Other side of the lake?” Maggie yelled.

“One, two, three, go!”

Alex was halfway across the lake before it struck her that she hadn’t had such carefree fun in a long time. Her lungs burned and her skin was sticky with sweat, but her abs ached from deep belly laughter more than exertion, and her cheeks were sore from the kind of smiling she couldn’t remember coming so easily for such an extended period of time for years. 

“What are we doing?” Alex asked with a bark of laughter.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m winning!” Maggie yelled, using Alex’s distraction to row past her.

“Fuck you!” But there was no malice in her words, and Alex simply pushed herself a little harder to catch up, holding steady with Maggie’s pace as they rowed side-by-side.

“You even trying to win?”

Alex shrugged. “We’re tied. I think…with you I might be okay with being tied.”

“You’re definitely getting soft on me, Danvers.” Even still, Maggie slowed the speed of her rowing until she was simply coasting.

“We’ll see who’s sore tomorrow and let that answer our question.” Alex stretched back, basking in the sun that had risen high in the sky while they were with Quill. She nearly choked at the sight of Maggie pulling off her sweatshirt, leaving her in just a black tank top.

“See something you like?”

Her cheeks flushed, Alex forced herself to act cool. “Just thinking that’s a good idea.” She balanced her paddle across the kayak and slipped out of her own DEO-issued half-zip, shoving it into her bag and looking up in time to find Maggie’s eyes tracing along the lines of muscle. “See something you like?” Alex parroted back.

Maggie shrugged, her eyes still roving across the planes of Alex’s upper back and her arms. “Think all that sparring with Supergirl has done good things for you.”

Alex licked her lips, feeling a surge of pride welling up inside of her. “Yeah, well…you, uh, you’re not so bad yourself.”

They lapsed into silence then, letting the gentle swells of water slowly carry them up and around the center of the lake.

“How’d you end up joining the DEO?” Maggie asked, breaking Alex out of her thoughts.

“Oh, uh, I don’t know.”

“Really?” Maggie scoffed. “You just woke up one morning and  _boom_! DEO agent?”

“Fuck off.” Alex took a deep breath and shook her head. “No. Well, uh, my dad was DEO.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, he, uh, not always. He joined to protect Kara after the DEO—the old DEO, back when the real Hank Henshaw ran it—they, uh, came for Kara because I, um, I let her take me flying, and I guess they had things set up to monitor for stuff like that.” Alex took a shuddering exhale and felt a warm weight on her forearm.

“It wasn’t your fault, Alex.”

“It sort of was. I should have—I should have known better.”

“You were a kid. Why would you have possibly assumed you were under 24/7 surveillance?”

“They’d told me to be careful.”

“Being careful means, like, looking both ways before you cross the street, not assuming that some evil organization is gonna come snatch up your little sister in the middle of the night.”

Alex just shrugged.

“I’m serious, Alex. Who in the hell would blame a kid for not knowing shit like that?”

“I don’t know. I just, I should have known. I should have.”

“Should I have known that my parents would kick me out when they found out I was gay?”

“What?” Alex gasped, the pangs of self-loathing instantly replaced by sharp spikes of anger at Maggie’s parents and Eliza and everyone who had ripped her childhood away from her. “No!”

“There were probably signs. They’d always been weird about gay things, and they were really religious. I should have known and been more careful.”

“Maggie, no. No, that’s not the same at all. It’s not your fault; it’s theirs. They were the ones who did something wrong, not you.”

“Yeah, and Hank Henshaw and the DEO were the ones who did something wrong. It’s not your fault that you didn’t expect hatred and bigotry. No one should have to.”

“Maybe,” Alex conceded, feeling for the first time in her life like maybe it wasn’t completely her fault. “Anyway, um, they took him, but I didn’t know they were the DEO at the time. Over the years, Hank Henshaw was replaced with J’onn.”

“Yeah, I remember the big article about him in The Trib.”

“Right, right. I forget sometimes how many people know his story now.”

“Yeah… I, uh, I know I gave you a hard time about the DEO, but I do believe that it’s changed. I mean, it has. A lot.”

“I know we still have work to do, but…yeah, J’onn has fought hard to change things since taking over, and he’s been able to do it a lot more since coming out publicly as J’onn, instead of Hank.”

“It’s not just J’onn, though. It’s you too.”

Alex pursed her lips, ducking her head down.

“I’m serious. You—you’ve listened to me, to the aliens at the bar. You’ve changed, you know? And that’s really impressive. Most people they don’t. They get to an opinion and then they hold onto it even when it’s outlived its usefulness. But you were willing to change, and that—that is really fucking inspiring, Alex.”

“Shut up.”

Maggie chuckled. “Fine, don’t take a compliment. See if I give you one again.”

They lapsed into silence for a while until Maggie nudged Alex’s kayak with her paddle. “So how’d you end up at the DEO?”

“Oh right. Well, my dad got really injured out on the mission that was supposed to capture J'onn, even though he hadn't done anything criminal. My dad, well, he disobeyed orders when he found J'onn, but he got really hurt when the rest of the team found them. While my dad was dying with J’onn—J’onn as J’onn, I mean—he made him promise that he would protect Kara and me.” Alex took a deep breath, running her hand over the back of her neck and wondering idly if she was going to end up with a sunburn. “Then during grad school I wasn’t, um, doing so well.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I just…I still blamed myself for my dad’s death, and my mom always had such high expectations that I could never seem to meet, and then Kara was there just constantly excelling where I was failing. And I think…I think part of me knew I wasn’t straight, like, those feelings and attractions and stuff were creeping up and scaring the shit out of me.” Alex rubbed at her eyes, trying to force back questions about how different her life might have been had she realized certain things earlier. “School was hard, and I didn’t have many people I could talk to—especially not about anything family-related. So I started drinking, and then it was just…when I was drunk, things felt easier. But they didn’t actually get easier.”

Maggie let out a hum of understanding.

“Anyway, the day I got a letter telling me I was officially on academic probation, I went out and got really drunk—like, plastered. I don’t remember a ton, but I got picked up by the cops and dumped into the drunk tank. And J’onn—he came and found me, offered me a job, a new start.” Thinking back, Alex chuckled darkly. “Bit of a kick in the pants too. Told me I could do so much more than what I was doing then, throwing away my life and all. So, yeah. Joined up. Got my shit together. Didn’t really have time to drink, let alone go out to clubs and get hammered a few times a week. I don’t know.” Alex shook her head, pushing her hair back out of her face. “I know the DEO isn’t great with some things, but it gave me purpose again, helped me feel like I mattered, like my life and my work mattered.”

“I get that,” Maggie murmured. “Not exactly like the police as an institution are all sunshine and rainbows.” Alex snorted. “But my job? It helps me feel like I’m making a difference where one needs to be made. And maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but…I don’t know. Gotta believe in something, right?”

“I think you probably make even more of a difference than you’re giving yourself credit for,” Alex whispered.

It was Maggie’s turn to mutter, “Shut up,” then.

“I’m serious.” Alex’s gaze dropped to her lap, and she fiddled with the worn grip of the paddle. “You changed my life.”

Maggie was quiet for a long while, but Alex was too nervous to look over to see the effects of what she’d said. But then a warm hand searched hers out, tugging hard enough to bring their kayaks close, the hard plastic thumping together. For a while, they sat in silence, hands clasped together, kayaks bobbing in the water, skin rapidly cooling even under the warm midday sun, both of them unwilling to move for what felt like hours.

The growl of Maggie’s stomach finally pulled them back to reality. “Sorry.”

“No, no. I’m actually starving,” Alex laughed.

“Think you can make it back to shore?”

“Yeah, but, uh, maybe we don’t race? I might have plenty of stamina, but I don’t know that I can carry you back to the tent if you collapse.”

“Oh ha, ha.” Maggie rolled her eyes.

Eventually they made it to shore and paid their late fees and traipsed the rest of the way back to their campsite. Too tired to think about doing anything elaborate for food, they pulled out the loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, sinking down onto one of the log benches by the remnants of their earlier fire.

Alex narrowed her eyes at Maggie’s “sandwich.”

“What?” Maggie asked, a hint of defensiveness in her tone.

“You’ve got like…nothing on there. It’s just bread.”

“It’s bread and peanut butter.”

“Barely. I can still see patches of bread.”

Maggie peered over at Alex’s bread, finding it loaded up with a thick layer of peanut butter. “At least I’ll be able to swallow my sandwich and still talk afterward.”

“At least I’ll have gotten my protein.”

“Yeah, for the whole week!”

Alex simply stuck out her tongue and took a big bite of her sandwich, washing it down with a large mouthful of water. “Delicious.”

“Weirdo.”

After a few more mouthfuls, Alex looked up. “I, um, I guess we don’t have to stay any longer, huh?”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess he was pretty cooperative.”

“Right.”

“I mean, I did tell my captain I wouldn’t be around tomorrow, but I totally understand that you probably want to get back and all.”

“I’d stay!” Alex rushed it out fast enough that the words slurred together. “I mean, um, if you want to. I—J’onn isn’t expecting me back until Monday.”

“Oh, uh, yeah? You want to take a real day off and just hang out here?”

Heart hammering in her chest, Alex nodded, not quite trusting herself to make words work yet.

“If we’re gonna stick around, I may want to find the showers here.”

Alex glanced down at the mud climbing up her calves from where her pants had pulled up during their race, the sweat and lake water drying on her skin. “Yeah…that’s not a bad idea.”

“Want to try to find them while we’ve still got daylight?”

“Sounds good.”

Alex shoved the last two bites of her sandwich into her mouth before getting up to find her towel and clothes, plus the soap she’d thrown into her bag in case they had needed the extra day.

Following the map, they took turns holding the towels and bags while they waited for each other to use the dingy bathroom, then walked further down the path to where the showers were supposedly located.

Alex’s nose crinkled up at the faint smell of mildew that permeated the tiled room. She was grateful to have thrown a pair of shitty flip-flops into her bag at the last minute. They grabbed side-by-side shower stalls, and Alex hung her bag on the half-broken hook, pulling the janky curtain across enough to keep most of her covered as she stripped out of her dirty clothing, shoving it into the side pocket of her bag to keep it from getting everything else gross. She let out a little squeak as she tried to balance on one foot while taking off her boots and socks and putting on the flip-flops, but eventually she made it into the shower half of the stall, enduring a few long seconds of ice cold water before the spray began warming.

A few moments later, the shower next to her turned on as well, and Alex glanced to her right, startling at the realization that the walls were low enough that she could—if she were a much worse person—look directly into the one next to her.

Maggie’s eyes appeared a moment later, her nose barely reaching the dividing wall. “No peeking!”

“I’m not!”

“I know, Danvers,” Maggie chuckled. “I’m just teasing you.” A beat. “Though I’m pretty easy on the eyes.”

“And so humble too.” Alex lowered the temperature of the water in her shower a few degrees, trying to distract from thoughts of how very close Maggie’s very naked body was. Sure, it was probably about the same distance between their beds and that godforsaken wall, but this felt…more intimate. And not only because they could see each other if they simply looked.

Maggie’s voice pulled Alex out of her thoughts. “So…you, uh, tried dating around at all?”

And Alex didn’t want to read into things, but she swore there was a note of nervousness to it. “Um…no.”

“Oh. That’s cool.”

“Yeah. I just, you know, I’m sort of busy.”

“But not too busy for camping?”

Alex caught Maggie’s gaze darting over to glance at her. “Well, I—this started out as work.” She didn’t add that Maggie was always an exception, always the one she willingly left work early to see for drinks or pool or dinner.

“Right. Yeah, that’s true.”

Was that disappointment? Alex glanced over and found Maggie’s mouth pulled tight. “Plus, I mean…I have fun with you.” Maggie looked up at that. “Why would I go on some shitty date that would take away time from either work or the people I enjoy spending time with?”

“Some people might call dating fun.”

“I’m sure it is. With…with the right person.”

“And I guess people would probably say you need to, I don’t know, go out to find the right person.”

“Even if you’re pretty sure you already know a right person?”

Alex glanced over the wall, willing Maggie to look back at her, to see in her eyes the words she couldn’t quite get all the way out.

Instead Maggie simply shrugged her shoulders. “People might tell you that you should—you should go check. Because maybe you only think someone is good or right because you haven’t seen what else is out there. The better options someone as great as you could have in an instant.”

“I think I already have a pretty amazing option,” Alex whispered. “Or, well, I don’t know if it’s an option. But maybe sometimes…sometimes it feels like it could be an option.”

Maggie turned off the water then, dropping her head into her hands and taking a few deep breaths.

“Maggie.”

“You deserve options who haven’t been…haven’t turned out to be such a bad choice for everyone that came before, Alex.”

“Fuck everyone else. I care about what’s best for me. For us,” she added in a much smaller voice. “I don’t exactly have the greatest track record with the people I’ve tried dating, but I still—I like to think that I care enough to be a good choice this time around. Because this time I want to try, I want to work to be better.”

“Alex.” It was a cross between a prayer for Alex to stay away and a desperate plea for her to keep fighting.

Alex turned off the water and stepped out of the shower stall.  With her back turned, she missed the way Maggie’s face fell, the way her eyes squeezed shut tight as she fought to keep the tears at bay.

But then Alex was throwing Maggie’s towel at her and storming in, her own towel hastily tucked under her armpits and her gaze averted until she thought Maggie was probably covered up again. “Maggie, I don’t care about what your exes said. I don’t care that you can be stubborn and spend too much time at work. I don’t care that you make the world’s worst peanut butter sandwiches. I don’t care that you’re terrible at pool but still think you’re good enough to trash talk the competition. I—all those things? They just make me like you more.”

“What?” Maggie let out a breathy laugh, still trying to wrap her head around the situation.

Alex took the last few steps to close the distance between them, pausing a few inches away from Maggie’s mouth. “If it wasn’t abundantly obvious, I like you, Maggie Sawyer. And I’d really, really like to kiss you.”

Maggie nodded, reaching up with the hand not holding her towel and cupping Alex’s jaw as she brought their lips together.

Alex sighed as they fell into a rhythm that felt like coming home, like everything she’d always wanted a kiss to feel like and more. She pulled back for a moment, taking a shuddering inhale as she leaned her forehead against Maggie’s, her lips curled up into a soft smile.

But then it much too long away from the only place she wanted to be, and Alex ducked forward once more, claiming Maggie’s lips in a kiss that was slightly less chaste, relying more on instinct than conscious thought this time. And maybe Alex didn’t know exactly what to do, but dammit, her body knew she wanted Maggie’s lower lip between her own lips. And she wasn’t sure what she should be doing with her hands, but something deep inside of her wanted to know what it would feel like to have her fingers buried in Maggie’s hair, and the answering moan she received sent a jolt of heat straight through to Alex’s core that left her acutely aware of all the other things her body really, really wanted to do.

“Fuck,” Alex managed, her breathing more ragged than it had been even at the end of their sprint to the campsite.

“Been wanting to do that for a while,” Maggie murmured, and Alex couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement, but either way, she was all too happy to agree. “We should probably put on clothes, though.”

And Alex wanted to protest that putting  _on_  clothing sounded like the very last thing they should do, but she nodded anyway, forcing herself away from Maggie and back into her own stall. She got dressed quickly enough that she even let her big toe graze the wet tile floor, but she couldn’t find it within herself to mind because the faster she moved, the faster she could see Maggie again, and the faster she saw Maggie again, the faster she could be kissing Maggie again.

As it turned out, the kiss she got was barely a peck, but Maggie tangled their fingers together as she led them back to the campsite under the glow of the setting sun, and Alex thought that maybe that was just as good. Because when they got back, Maggie spun Alex into her a second time and let their lips find each other once more. Without the towels to be held up—not that Alex would have minded if they had fallen away—hands roamed more freely, curling around upper arms and caressing the backs of necks and pulling at hips.

They paused only for dinner and another hour of stargazing. Alex found the telescope distinctly harder to use when Maggie’s arms were wrapped around her, but she’d be damned before she complained about it.

That night, Maggie insisted they still sleep in their own sleeping bags, insisted that they keep things at a pace that would allow Alex to get used to things before diving in all at once, and Alex figured there was probably enough reason in it not to object.

Alex woke up with her sleeping bag half on top of Maggie’s, one arm poking out to flop across Maggie’s chest. And even though it was so far from the romantic visions Alex had entertained the night before, she found she might just prefer it.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some fluff and family and case progress for the first half, but do note that the second half is distinctly NSFW

Alex’s first few days back passed by in a flurry of final trials with the antidote that concluded in the successful administration of it to the aliens they had in containment, whose first few days under observation were still going well. Her nights were spent on dates with Maggie that ended with increasingly heated make-out sessions up against the door to each other’s apartments as they tried to force things to progress slowly by keeping them semi-public.

Yet, slow or not, Eliza and Kara weren’t about to let Maggie spend Thanksgiving alone, and they invited her to join them for the meal even before they’d heard from Alex that the camping trip had, indeed, turned into a date.

Of course, the moment they caught sight of Alex and Maggie’s joined hands outside Noonan’s one morning and found out what had actually happened, there were cheers and  _I told you so_ ’s and welcoming hugs for Maggie, who looked more than a little overwhelmed at the attention. But by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, there were other, more pressing concerns—food to be cooked and a table to be set and toasts to be made—and gradually the attention fell away from Maggie.

It was during the end of the meal when everyone was stuffed but trying to finish their second and third plates of food that the burner phone buzzed in Alex's pocket. Maggie glanced up at Alex. “Is that—?”

“Yeah,” Alex murmured, muttering out an apology as she stepped away from the table.

“Week from today. 9pm. 1642 Monroe Boulevard.”

“More notice than we expected,” Maggie whispered.

Alex nodded as she sent back a thank you, confirming receipt.

“The antidote ready?”

“Seems to be working well.”

“And the guys you had working on the financials?”

“One of them, er, hacked into Roulette’s bank accounts.” Alex pointedly ignored the glare from Maggie. “We were able to filter in a bit of money from the DEO that we could track, and it led us back to Lillian. We assume as payment for the drugs.”

“Wait, really?”

“Or, well, a shell account that’s tied to old LuthorCorp funds and has been accessed by individuals tied to Cadmus, and we’re working on getting together something that would be able to be used in court as proof to tie Lillian to Cadmus.” Unfortunately to topple someone as high profile as Lillian, that meant more than J’onn’s mindreading and Lena’s suspicions and Alex and Supergirl’s word. “We assume now that Lena has taken over and completely cut off her mother from company funds and now that Cadmus has lost all government funding, things are getting a little dire. Maybe even dire enough for Lillian to get sloppy.”

“So we might actually get something that sticks?”

“Fingers crossed.”

“Girls,” Eliza called out. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine! We’ll be right back.” Alex forced herself to push away thoughts about the case for the time being—after dessert they could get back to plotting and preparation, but in that moment, there were pies to be eaten before Kara could demolish them all.

“Everything okay?” Kara asked under her breath when Alex and Maggie sat back down at the table.

Alex shrugged. “Might be good news. Got a confirmation on date and time from Quill. I’ll fill you in after dessert.” She looked back up to find her mother asking Maggie a string of questions about work and family and what she did for fun. “It’s not 20 questions, Mom.”

“I’m simply getting to know the woman who finally got you to be yourself.”

Alex’s cheeks burned with embarrassment, and Maggie ducked her head, and the silence gave Eliza all the opportunity she needed to launch into another round of questions. “Now, Alex told me that you two met through work. Are you being careful? I know how dangerous some of the situations Alex gets into can be.”

“I am,” Maggie assured Eliza. “And, you know, it helps knowing we’ve got Supergirl on our side.” Maggie smiled at Kara, who choked on her sip of water, while Alex buried her face in her hands.

Eliza glared at Alex. “Alexandra. You should know better than to tell secrets that aren’t your own.”

“I didn’t tell her! Kara’s the one that went all protective little sister as Supergirl, and Maggie figured it out!”

Eliza arched an eyebrow at Kara then. “Kara. You need to be more careful with your identity. If you act like Alex’s sister in and out of the costume, people will put the puzzle pieces together.”

“Nu-uh! Maggie thought we were dating first!”

Maggie cringed at the reminder.

“Well I wasn’t about to let her think that was true,” Alex shot back.

“It would have kept my identity safe!”

“And kept me from getting a date!”

Clearing her throat, Maggie raised her hand a little. “I, um, it was partially the weird relationship dynamics, but also…you’ve got Supergirl’s hair. And her face. And her voice.”

“I told you glasses weren’t enough of a disguise.” Alex stuck her tongue out at Kara, who huffed and crossed her arms.

“It works for most people.”

“Not on freakin’ Queen of All Media, Cat Grant, apparently.”

Kara’s cheeks flushed a faint shade of pink, and Eliza took in deep, calming breaths. “Can one of you please assure me that these are anomalies, that my daughters are both as safe as they can be and being smart about the work they do?”

“We are,” Kara and Alex answered in unison, sounding a bit like petulant children who had been caught crossing the street without a parent present. 

Eliza inclined her head slowly, then brought it back up. “I suppose I needn’t have turned on the oven to pretend like we had cooked the turkey the old fashioned way, hmm?”

“Wait.” Maggie’s gaze darted between Kara and the turkey sitting over on the counter. “You…”

Kara let her eyes glow red before blinking them back to blue, grinning at Maggie’s gaping mouth. “Saves time and energy.”

“Huh.”

“What? None of your alien exes used their powers for little things around the house?” Alex arched an eyebrow, shaking her head at the wicked smirk that curled up the corner of Maggie’s mouth when Eliza wasn’t looking. On second thought, Alex decided she really didn’t need to know. 

With secrets out in the open, though, the conversation drifted to talk of the case and the antidote, then back to childhood memories as Eliza regaled Maggie with stories of Kara’s and Alex’s most embarrassing moments. She got to hear about Kara’s insistence that bathrobes were formal attire—“They looked the closest to Kryptonian robes!”—and a young Alex’s enthusiasm over getting her fist pair of “big girl underwear” with Little Mermaid characters printed on them and being so excited that she went around showing them to all of her parents’ friends at a dinner party—“You and Dad told me to be proud of them!”

Eventually, the knowledge that they would all have to be awake early for work and plane rides forced them up and into the kitchen to help Kara with a bit of clean up even as she sped her way through the worst of it.

“You’ll both be safe getting home?” Eliza looked between Maggie and her daughter. “Alex, you’ll drive her back?”

“Going to the same place, Mom,” Alex sighed.

“Oh, er, right. Of course. Twenty-first century and all that.”

“No!” Alex’s voice cracked and she waved her hand out in front of her. “No! Not—we’re neighbors.”

“Ah, I see.” Eliza’s brow furrowed as she looked over at Kara. “ _That_  neighbor?”

Kara snorted, and Alex and Maggie both froze, sporting matching expressions of shock.

“We’re gonna go!” Alex yelped, spinning on her heels and bodily dragging Maggie out the door to Kara’s apartment, not stopping until they were safely in the car. As she turned the keys in the ignition, Alex let out a huff of an exhale, shaking her head and laughing because honestly, what else could she do?

“You, um…told your mom about that?”

“No. No, I did not.”

“Then how—”

“Kara.”

The pained look in Maggie’s eyes almost made Alex forget about all the nights of loud sex and taunting notes that had made her hate her unknown neighbor in the first place. “Kara knows?”

Alex rubbed at the back of her neck as she maneuvered out of the parking spot. “She might have been over one day and, you know, heard a bit…”

“Oh my god.” Maggie dropped her head into her hands. “I hate everything. I can never look her in the eyes again.”

“It’s fine. We, um, we left pretty quickly.”

The thought didn’t appear to comfort Maggie much, but she let it go, and eventually they were both so wrapped up in talk of the case that the earlier embarrassment was forgotten.

They ended the night making out in the car like teenagers, hands fisting in clothing and breathing growing ragged as the windows fogged up and the air in the car grew steamy. After a long while, Maggie pulled away, resting her forehead against Alex’s as she fought to catch her breath. “We should—we should go upstairs.”

“Mm, I like the sound of that.”

“To our own apartments, Alex.”

“Your chivalry is a little grating sometimes,” Alex grumbled, though she popped open the door to the car anyway.

“Well then I guess I won’t offer to cook for you this weekend.”

“No! No, you, uh, should definitely still do that.”

With a little smile, Maggie nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow too, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

\---

“I should come with you on Thursday.” Kara narrowed her eyes and put her hands on her hips, looking every bit the part of Supergirl as she glared at Alex at their Friday morning meeting.

“No. It’s not safe.”

“And it’s safe for you? I’m the bulletproof one!”

“You know as well as I do that anything connected to Cadmus will have weapons designed to hurt you.”

“Yeah, and pretty much  _all_  weapons are designed to hurt you, but you don’t see me stepping in to stop you.”

“Agent Danvers. Supergirl.” J’onn looked between them, his lips pursed and his arms folded across his chest. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

“Fine,” Alex huffed, slinking back to where Maggie was standing.

“Now, as I was saying, based on the hard work of Agent Danvers and Detective Sawyer, we know that next week on Thursday night, Roulette will be hosting another one of her fight club parties. We will have a team of agents undercover at the party—some as guests, others as caterers. All will be equipped with body cameras to get as many of the party’s attendees on film as possible, as well as to provide NCPD with additional evidence for the court case that we hope will result from the night’s sting operation.” The room murmured with assent, members of the various teams glancing up at the board to find their assignments. “As a reminder, most of the aliens there will have been taking steroids, some of them for months now. The goal is containment, treatment, and release once the antidote has run its course.”

Maggie bumped her shoulder against Alex’s, smiling and mouthing, “Good job,” at her.

“Detective Sawyer.” J’onn motioned to Maggie to take over for her part of the briefing.

“Ideally, we should have administered a first shot of the antidote, which will contain a small amount of a mild sedative, to as many of the aliens as we can before the fights begin and before NCPD storms the building. If not, we worry some of the aliens could be persuaded to fight for Roulette, increasing the odds of fatalities, which we definitely don’t want.” Maggie glanced over at Alex, smiling at the sight of the thumbs up Alex was shooting her. “We have reason to believe that the most powerful alien fighters will be kept in cages before the matches.”

“And that’s where I come in.” Winn rolled his desk chair around to the laptop whose display was projected onto the large monitor. “In past interactions with Cadmus, we’ve found that they use a type of electronic lock technology originally designed by LuthorCorp. It is, uh”—Winn’s mouth twitched as his gaze fell to the table—“similar to the design we use here at the DEO. But! On the plus side, that means that I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to hack into them remotely, unlocking them one at a time if we manage to get agents back into the containment area.”

“And that’s where I could be useful,” Kara huffed. “I move a lot faster and have a much better chance of surviving an encounter with some of these species if they were to get loose.”

“Supergirl makes a good argument.” J’onn held up a hand before Alex could interject. “But we won’t send her in alone. Agents Ramirez and Cardile, you’ll go with her. Agent Danvers, you and Detective Sawyer will take point on locating the uncaged aliens before and during the matches. Choose two more agents you trust, and take them with you.”

Alex nodded in understanding, already thinking through the options, considering who was best under pressure and least likely to end up seriously injuring or killing an alien who lashed out under the sway of the steroids.

After a few more minutes spent reviewing the plans and details, J’onn dismissed them all.

Maggie squeezed Alex’s hand as they wandered toward the entrance to the building. “I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I feel like we might pull this off.”

“I sure hope so.”

\--- 

That weekend, instead of going out to eat, Maggie came over to make dinner as she had promised, toting in a large bag of ingredients from next door while Alex looked on, peering over Maggie’s shoulder as she unloaded containers and bags of vegetables before finally shooing Alex out of the kitchen so that she could focus. The dinner ended up being delicious—not that Alex had really expected anything different—but her thoughts still wandered to everything she hoped would come later that evening. 

After dinner, Alex turned on some French film whose glowing review happened to have been printed right next to one of Kara’s articles in The Tribune. Not that Alex really thought they would be watching the movie. At least she hoped they wouldn’t be.

The subtitles and slow build into the plot seemed to have the desired effect, and within a few minutes, Alex felt Maggie’s arm slipping behind her. She let out a hum of contentment and nuzzled into the touch, turning her head enough that Maggie took the hint and kissed her softly. Of course, after literal months of waiting, even if it had only been a week of dating, Alex wasn’t quite content with keeping things soft and slow. While Maggie grew bold in the hallways and the night in the car, letting her hands roam, sometimes even dipping beneath hems, she was always so careful when they were behind closed doors to keep things PG.

But that night Alex was determined to bump things up to at least a PG-13. So when the kisses grew heated, tongues slipping between parted lips and soft sighs escaping with every gentle caress, Alex pulled herself up and swung one leg over Maggie’s lap, barely even breaking the kiss as she got settled. When Maggie hesitated, her hands hovering somewhere around Alex’s waist, Alex reached behind her and drew them lower, shivering at the contact.

As their kisses grew sloppier, their movements more insistent, Alex felt Maggie’s hands slip around to her ass, and she rolled her hips into Maggie’s in turn, relishing in the gasp that fell from Maggie’s lips at the movement.

“Please,” Alex murmured before Maggie could pull away or call it a night or act like nothing had happened. And she wasn’t sure if it was the word or the needy rasp of her voice that did it, but Maggie surged up into her, hands suddenly everywhere, slipping beneath the back of her shirt and palming at soft expanses of skin they had only explored once before out in the hallway. Unlike that time, Alex didn’t keep her hands to herself. Instead, she tugged at the hem of Maggie’s shirt, letting her hands slip under it at the feeling of Maggie  moving to accommodate her. And oh, that was what she had been dreaming about for days on end. Maggie’s skin was soft and warm to the touch, but Alex could feel the ripple of toned muscle just below the surface, and she longed for the chance to see and feel more of it, to have Maggie stretched out before her, their clothes long since discarded.

“Can I take this off?” Alex asked, her mouth apparently keeping time with her thoughts.

“If you want to.”

With a nod, Alex pulled the shirt up and over Maggie’s head, her breath catching in her throat at the sight of tan skin and taut muscle and the swell of Maggie’s chest beneath a lacy black bra that Alex suspected might have been chosen with the idea that something like this could happen. At least, that was why she was wearing her own fancy black bra, and the thought left her drawing Maggie’s hands further up her chest, encouraging Maggie to strip Alex of her shirt as well.

Eventually slow, gentle explorations gave way to desperate groping as they fell to the couch, Alex rolling on top of Maggie as her fingers slipped beneath the band of Maggie’s bra, cupping at Maggie’s breasts and rolling her nipple between her fingers until Maggie’s breath was coming in short gasps, her hips stuttering beneath Alex’s. Alex dropped her head then, letting instinct take over and mouthing at Maggie’s hard nipples through the layer of lace. She groaned at the feeling of Maggie’s fingers tangling in her hair.

“Fuck, Alex.”

Alex clung tighter to Maggie at that, her hands running up jean-covered thighs and her mouth still working at Maggie’s chest.

“Alex,” Maggie whimpered once more, finally pulling back as Alex sat back on her heels. Maggie’s hair was disheveled, her lips kiss-swollen, her neck and collarbone decorated with a long line of slowly developing bruises. Alex thought she looked gorgeous.

She watched as Maggie’s gaze raked across her body, and before Alex could even start to give voice to the niggling insecurities about the scars that littered her torso, Maggie had flipped them over and was pressing soft kisses all across Alex’s abs and up her chest and murmuring about how beautiful Alex was, how perfect she was.

“Even with—”

“Because of them,” Maggie answered, pressing a soft kiss to what Alex considered the ugliest of her scars—a jagged circle from where she’d been speared by a particularly angry alien mother whose children had been threatened—not that Alex had known it at the time. “Because they’re part of you.” Alex gasped as one of Maggie’s hands palmed at her breasts. “So fucking gorgeous. Every inch.”

Alex felt herself melt under Maggie’s soft touches, though within minutes that warmth had turned molten, like nothing she had ever felt before. Even with the long weeks spent guiltily fantasizing about Maggie, it had never been like this—never this much.

“Please,” Alex whimpered. She wasn’t entirely certain what she was begging for, but she knew she needed it—a knowledge drawn from somewhere deep inside of her.

Maggie pulled back panting, her tongue running across her teeth and her eyes dark with lust. She blinked slowly, as if coming to. “I—I should go.”

“Please don’t.”

“It’s barely been a week, Alex.”

“And? I’ve seen you every single day, so this is pretty much date number 7.”

Maggie chuckled at that, pressing a chaste kiss to Alex’s lips that was most definitely not what Alex wanted. “It’s after midnight, and I know we’re both exhausted. I want to do this right, make you feel special and cared for. I don’t want to be half-asleep, groping you through your pants on your couch.”

“My high school boyfriend was fine with it,” Alex grumbled.

“And did you like your high school boyfriend?”

“No, but it wasn’t because he groped me on the living room couch.”

Maggie’s mouth curled up into a smile. “At least sleep on it tonight, okay?”

“Don’t really know how I’m supposed to get to sleep like this,” Alex muttered, flushing a deep shade of red when she realized Maggie had heard her.

Maggie’s throat bobbed as she swallowed, then she drew in a shaky breath, letting it out through her nose as her eyes fluttered shut. “I should definitely go.”

“Fine.”

“Aww c’mon, don’t be like that.”

“No, I know. I had fun. Really.”

“Great movie, huh?” Maggie teased, motioning at the Netflix home screen projected on the television, since the movie had, apparently, ended.

“One of my new favorites.”

Maggie chuckled as she gathered her things. “See you tomorrow, Danvers.”

And with one last lingering kiss and a glance in both directions down the hallway, Maggie scampered the few feet to her door, her shirt clutched in her hand and her shoes tucked under her arm.

“Night,” Alex called, blowing a kiss down to Maggie.

“Sweet dreams.” Maggie winked. 

Alex rolled her eyes before stepping back into her apartment and pulling the door shut, collapsing into it as she did up the locks. She wondered if Maggie would be able to hear the vibrator if she brought it out into the living room. The damn thing was loud, and she would probably wake her other neighbors, but she thought in that moment it might be worth it.

Her phone dinged in the middle of her musings with a text from Maggie. 

 **Maggie:** It was so hard leaving. I really did have a wonderful night.

 **Alex:**  You’re only a few feet away…you could always come back.

 **Maggie:** I shouldn’t.

 **Alex:**  If you say so…

 **Maggie:**  You know this is hard for me too, right?

 **Alex:**  Is it? You make leaving seem pretty easy.

 **Maggie:**  Trust me, it’s not. I wanted nothing more than to carry you back into your bedroom and find out what exactly I’d been missing out on behind that wall.

 **Alex:**  Ha! You missing out on something? You only heard me, you know.

 **Maggie:**  If it’s that hard to sleep, maybe I’ll hear it again?

 **Maggie:**  Sorry! Was that too much? I don’t know.

 **Alex:**  No! You’re fine. I, uh, was thinking about that too.

 **Maggie** : Oh really?

 **Alex:** I was debating whether it would be rude to wake the neighbor on the other side from my living room.

 **Maggie:**  You shouldn’t wake him. I heard he’s mean. You should definitely move any and all activities to your bedroom.

 **Alex:** That so?

 **Maggie:**  Definitely.

 **Maggie:** If you want to.

The threat of embarrassment warred with the strong currents of arousal, but the latter proved too strong to be ignored, and Alex slowly ambled into her bedroom, giving a little knock to their shared wall, which was met with two quiet knocks in return.

Alex perched on the edge of her bed, wondering what she was even doing.

A minute or two later, a dull  _thunk_  sounded against the wall, followed by a low groan that sent a jolt of heat straight to Alex’s core.

The breathy sigh that followed was enough to drive Alex’s hand down between her own legs as she shoved her skinny jeans and underwear off in one go, blushing faintly at how wet she already was when they hadn’t even made it to the bedroom. A small voice in the back of her head suggested that Maggie would probably find it hot, and Alex tried to listen to that voice for a change as her fingers drifted back between her legs, gathering wetness as they parted her folds and flicked up and over her clit.

When Alex’s head fell back hard against the wall at the rush of pleasure that left her gasping, she heard a strangled moan echo through her room.

With a concerted effort not to hold back, Alex let her moans and whimpers grow louder than they normally were, inspired as she was by all that she could hear a few layers of plaster and drywall away.

Suddenly, there was a  _whack_ —something like a flat palm smacking up against the wall—then the rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings. It was followed by a high-pitched gasp and a long, low whimper that left Alex’s fingers scrabbling in the sheets, goosebumps erupting all across her skin.

She hadn’t planned on it, but Alex found herself desperate for more—for Maggie, really, though she knew she couldn’t have her yet. The vibrator, loud as it was, was still closer to the more she needed, and she hurried over to her closet, grabbing it and bringing a small stack of papers crashing down with it. She didn’t care about the mess. She could take care of it later. What mattered then was getting back into bed and dealing with the insistent throbbing between her legs.

With the knowledge of all that had happened, might well be happening again, a few inches away, Alex was barely even bothered by the noise of the vibrator. Letting instinct take over, Alex’s head dropped to the pillows, her hips canting up and chasing the source of her pleasure, and her hand moving the toy exactly where it needed to be. As white-hot pleasure jolted through her, Alex came with a loud cry of Maggie’s name that she suspected, with a surge of embarrassment, could probably be heard even over the rumbling roar of the toy.

But before she could start to hate herself for it, she heard her own name—breathy, begging, barely recognizable until the third or fourth repetition, growing louder and clearer and needier each time—and then another gasp followed by the groaning of worn mattress springs that had Alex ready to go again and again.

But she didn’t want Maggie to think she lacked all self-control, so instead she forced herself to breathe deeply and put away the toy and settle in under the comforter. A text was waiting for her.

 **Maggie:**  I had a lot of fun, hope you did too.

 **Alex:**  I did too.

 **Alex:**  But I’m hoping we don’t always have a wall between us. It’s that or I’m gonna tear it down myself.

 **Maggie:**  Alright there, Mr. President.

 **Alex:**  ?

 **Maggie:**  Reagan to Gorbachev?

 **Alex:**  Oh!

 **Alex:**  Nerd.

 **Maggie:**  Pot, meet kettle.

 **Maggie:**  Anyway, promise, no walls soon enough, yeah?

 **Alex:**  I’m holding you to it.

 **Alex:**  Goodnight, Maggie.

 **Maggie:**  Night, Alex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bumping it up to 15 chapters because I realized that Thursday's chapter had too much going on in it to keep it as one, but then we'll be wrapping things up on Sunday. Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading and commenting and encouraging me!! I really appreciate it <3


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Case progress, some more Sanvers, and a bit of the Danvers sisters to cap it off. Note that this chapter is also NSFW

Tuesday was spent doing a full run-through of the plan for Thursday night, complete with three-dimensional maps that allowed the agents to virtually walk through the converted warehouse J’onn had gone undercover to surveil the night before; demonstrations of how to work the lightweight but nearly unbreakable needles DEO techs had filled with the antidote and a mild sedative; and lengthy demonstrations by Alex and Supergirl of the quietest ways to bring down a stronger opponent. And if Alex had shown off a little more in the ring than she normally would have, stripping down to a tank top instead of the standard DEO-issued polo, well, could anyone fault her? She was rather invested in getting further than having sex with a big fucking wall between them. 

After lunch, Maggie spent two full hours giving a powerpoint presentation to a room full of every agent that would be involved in the mission on the various alien species that would be present at the fight based on the rosters she and Alex had found, focusing on where the easiest spot for an injection of the antidote would be for each species and the best ways to stop or slow them without critically injuring them in the process—a point that hadn’t been covered in any kind of detail during basic DEO training.

Thanks to a bit of intel from M’gann, though she had steadfastly refused to come to the DEO to present it herself, Maggie was able to provide the agents with a few tips about some of the more powerful combatants they’d be facing. “Roulette has a select group of her favorite fighters—the ones she knows will bring in plenty of money in the betting pools. On the one hand, that means they’re some of the best fighters and probably the ones who have been given more of the steroid than anyone else.” A few of the agents glanced around at one another, the muscles in their jaws working. “But because they get put in the ring every fight, some of them have sustained injuries at this point that you should be able to exploit to get them down without doing serious damage.”

The first slide Maggie pulled up featured a vicious looking fighter from the planet Warworld. “Draaga. Strength to beat a Kryptonian’s and a proclivity for fighting even before the steroids. But”—Maggie held up a hand, silencing the murmurs that had rippled through the room about whether they should really be trying to stay gentle with someone like that—“he’s got an old injury to his right leg that leaves him vulnerable.” From there, Maggie went through a list, getting out as much information as she could until the agents seemed more settled, more secure in their mission to contain, not kill, even with the knowledge that many of the drugged aliens would likely attack without provocation. The one concession Maggie had made was that the aliens who had been wanted for attacks and crimes long before the fight ring began could be brought into DEO custody, so long as the fighting and any actions resulting from the drugs weren't counted held them. 

After Maggie finished her presentation, Alex split the agents up into groups based on what they would be doing on the night of the fight club infiltration, then flitted between them, checking in on their progress and ensuring that they were as ready as they could be. 

Through an informal collaboration with Lena and LCorp, Winn and Agent Demos had spent the weekend and all day Monday practicing hacking into various iterations of the electronic locking system, and Winn finally felt comfortable in his ability to unlock a single cage at a time without inadvertently releasing every alien in the place all at once.

Supergirl had been fitted with a less ostentatious version of her costume that Alex hoped would help keep attention off of her while she flitted between back rooms, even if it did remind both of them a bit too much of Astra and Non’s outfits. She practiced moving in it during the fighting demonstrations and promised to spend time in it over the next two days as well. After Maggie’s presentation, Kara spent an hour with Agents Ramirez and Cardile going over exactly what their contingency plan would be if any of the aliens got loose, but then she had to duck out for a series of editorial meetings at CatCo. 

By the time Alex and Maggie left the DEO it was nearly 9 at night. Despite having started at 8 that morning, Alex was still wound up, her veins coursing with adrenaline and anxiety and the arousal that hadn’t disappeared since the camping trip with Maggie.

“Do you, uh, maybe want to come over?” Alex scuffed at the sidewalk with her boots as she waited for Maggie’s answer.

“I could do that. You’re not too tired?”

Alex shot an incredulous look at Maggie. Even with the hours and hours of preparation, her whole body seemed to vibrate with pent-up energy that she doubted would leave her until Thursday had passed. “Are you?”

With a low chuckle, Maggie shook her head. “Fair point.”

Alex felt some of the energy settle into something more solid when Maggie clasped her hand, walking them down the street to where she’d parked her car that morning, grumbling the whole time about how “I still can’t believe I have clearance to get into the building but not to leave my car in the garage.”

On the short drive back to their apartment building, all of Alex’s nervous energy seemed to shift and tangle itself together in new configurations that demanded some kind of physical release. By the time Maggie was pulling the car into a spot, Alex’s nerves felt like they were on fire, and she nearly whimpered when Maggie trailed her thumb over the back of her hand. The car felt too hot, the air thick and her limbs heavy and a pulsing need drawing her attention to one thing and one thing only.

“Maggie,” Alex managed, her voice tight. “If you’re only waiting for me, please—please don’t.”

Maggie turned to Alex then, her eyes dark and her lower lip pulled between her teeth. Her knuckles were turning white from the tight grip she had around the steering wheel. And Alex could see her chest rising and falling with each deep breath. “Fuck.” She closed her eyes for a long moment. “Alex, you…are you sure?”

Alex’s mouth was hot against Maggie’s before the emergency brake had fully engaged, answering her with tongue and teeth and as much emotion as she could channel into a kiss.

“Slower,” Maggie purred, her hand cupping at Alex’s jaw and making her shudder. “Let’s go inside. You think about it, yeah? I don’t want you to do something because you think I expect it or because you’re nervous about Thursday or even because you’re turned on. There are other ways to take care of the rest of that stuff. I want it to be because you’re ready, and this—with me—is what you want.”

“Maggie,” Alex whispered, her forehead resting against Maggie’s, “you make me feel safe. You listen to me and challenge me. You showed me that I could be myself when I—when I was too scared to know how.” She swallowed heavily, reaching out to clasp Maggie’s free hand in her own. “I told you that I never really understood this, you know, intimacy or sex or whatever. But with you I do. And god, I want that so badly, but more than anything I want that  _with you_.”

“Yeah?”

Alex nodded her head, feeling as Maggie’s hand followed her, the soft press of Maggie's fingers never leaving her jaw.

“Then let’s go upstairs.”

The walk up the stairs felt interminably long, but when they got through the door of Alex’s apartment, Maggie was soft and slow, her movements careful and deliberate. “I trust you too,” she whispered as she guided Alex backwards, switching places when they got into the living room and leaning up against the arm of the couch as Alex stepped in between her legs, their mouths finally meeting once more. And Alex couldn’t help but feel like it was different. Weightier than before. Filled with more promise than possibility. Because it was slower, yes, but it was so clearly moving towards something. Every press of Maggie’s lips seemed to grow a little more insistent. Every drag of Maggie’s teeth added to the fire burning between them, resolving itself into something powerful and far-reaching. Every flick of Maggie’s tongue reminded Alex of all the other things they might do—things she hoped they  _would_ do.

The move to the bed left Alex acutely aware of the throbbing between her legs—a situation not helped when Maggie slotted her leg between Alex’s, rolling her hips forward and making Alex gasp, her hands dropping to Maggie’s ass to try to hold her there. Alex’s hips canted up without her permission, rutting against Maggie’s strong thighs as her body sought out its own pleasure.

But then Maggie was shifting back, kissing away the crinkle furrowing Alex’s brow with a low rumble of laughter. “I thought it might be nice to get rid of some of the clothing first.”

“Oh.” Alex let out a huff of nervous laughter. “Yeah, um, that sounds better.”

Alex was grateful when Maggie didn’t tease her for the tremble in her hands as she pulled off Maggie’s shirt and fumbled to unhook her bra. Maggie’s movements seemed impossibly graceful in comparison, and Alex found herself shirtless soon enough, Maggie’s mouth moving to kiss and lave attention across the expanses of newly uncovered skin.

The world faded away to nothing but the thump of her own heartbeat and the press of Maggie’s lips against her chest and the feel of Maggie’s hands caressing her sides, then flitting down to the waistband of her jeans, pausing only to check in before sliding them over Alex’s hips and down long legs. Her underwear joined the pile quickly enough that she barely had time to be embarrassed by the less than flattering style she wore for work that looked more like compression shorts than any kind of lingerie she had once imagined wearing for her first time with Maggie.

Alex’s hands were steadier when she reached for the button to Maggie’s pants, and the tension in the room broke when Maggie’s ankles got caught in them, sending her crashing back down to the mattress, landing half on top of Alex with a loud laugh. By the time Maggie had gotten disentangled, shucking off her own underwear in the process, Alex’s heart was in her throat. “You’re gorgeous.”

With a soft kiss to the corner of Alex’s mouth, Maggie whispered, “Not so bad yourself, Danvers.”

And there were so many more things Alex wanted to say—like how beautiful Maggie looked illuminated by the moonlight filtering in through the open blinds, or how perfectly soft her skin felt, or how their bodies seemed to fit together just right—but her body chose that moment to remember that she was, for the first time, in bed with Maggie. Completely naked. On the verge of having sex with her.

Maggie grinned at the shudder that ran through Alex.

The kisses grew more heated then, and Alex marveled at how utterly erotic it felt to be able to feel every inch of Maggie’s body against her own, no layers left between them, just soft expanses of heated skin. Every movement seemed to leave her poised on some great precipice, her heart thudding in her chest and her nerves tingling with anticipation for something—what, she didn’t exactly know, but she was certain she wanted it, wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.

“You still good?” Maggie murmured, nuzzling into Alex’s neck.

“So good,” Alex managed between breathy sighs as Maggie sucked and nipped her way down Alex’s neck. “And—and you? Are you, um, did you still want to…”

Maggie pulled back then, just enough to be able to hold Alex’s gaze as she pushed Alex’s hair back away from her forehead. “I want as much of you as you’re ready to give me.”

Alex thought it might be a superpower—Maggie’s ability to make her heart melt even as her blood still pumped with a heady mix of desire and anticipation.

Maggie began a torturously slow path down Alex’s body then, her mouth stopping at every point, memorizing each inch of Alex’s skin, grinning every time Alex’s hips jumped or her fingers fisted in the sheets. As Maggie’s mouth skimmed over Alex’s hipbones, travelling down her thighs, Maggie’s fingers began a slow ascent back up them, her thumbs rubbing firm circles into the muscles of Alex’s inner thighs, pushing higher and higher until the touches grew softer and Alex could feel Maggie’s fingers slipping across skin slick with the proof of her own arousal.

“Fuck,” Maggie groaned, her index finger dipping between Alex’s folds and trailing up and over her clit, making Alex gasp, her abs contracting and her hips jolting up at the contact. Then Maggie’s mouth was kissing back up her thighs and hovering over Alex, her breath warm against Alex’s skin. “Can I?”

Alex nearly cried out the resounding  _yes_. And it wasn’t even like she’d enjoyed it the handful of times it had happened before, but somehow she knew it would be different, better, simply because it was Maggie between her legs, Maggie looking up at her with wide eyes and a soft smile, Maggie ducking down and licking a broad stroke up the length of her.

And fuck, yes, it was better.  _So_  much better.

A long, needy whimper escaped Alex’s lips when she chanced a glance down and found Maggie staring right back at her, her eyes blown wide with lust and her head bobbing up and down as her lips and tongue did things Alex hadn’t known were even possible.

With Maggie’s tongue on her clit and Maggie’s finger grazing feather-light touches around her entrance and Maggie’s eyes, filled with lust and care and something that looked suspiciously like love, still trained on Alex’s face, watching for any signs of discomfort, Alex felt herself hurdle over the edge with a strangled moan. The strength of her orgasm took her by surprise, letting her spend a blissful few moments in oblivion before she blinked back to, realizing she’d lasted barely a minute. Her cheeks flamed with embarrassment and she covered her eyes with her forearm as she let out a low groan.

Maggie’s head snapped up immediately. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

Of course Maggie would come check on her.

“Alex?”

Alex kept her eyes covered. “I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“For…you know!” Alex squeaked.

“No, I—I really don’t know. Did you not want me to do something?”

“Maggie,” Alex whined, finally uncovering her eyes. Her expression was pained, and her cheeks stained a deep shade of red. “I’m humiliated. I feel like—like some kind of preteen boy.”

“Wha—oh. No. No, no, no. Alex, that’s nothing to be ashamed of, I promise.” Alex shot a disbelieving look up at Maggie. “It was hot.”

“How? I asked you to come back up here, and then I, you know, made it like a minute.”

“Who says it’s over?”

“Oh! No, no, of course. I didn’t mean—no, I do still want to try. I mean, I might not be any good, but I want to—”

“Alex,” Maggie interjected, laying a comforting hand on Alex’s chest. “You don’t have to be done either. It’s not a one-and-done kind of deal unless you want it to be.”

Alex blinked slowly. “I…”

“I would spend hours between your legs if you let me.”

And oh. That was something Alex never realized she could think about. Now it was all she could think about.

“I love knowing that I was able to make you feel that good that fast.”

“Really?”

“Definitely.”

“I, um, I do still want to, you know…try. For you, I mean.”

Alex felt the way Maggie’s body reacted, even as Maggie tried to keep her expression schooled to one of indifference. “It’s whatever you feel comfortable doing.”

“Trust me, I really, really want to. I don’t—well, I don’t know if I’ll be any good, but I want to try to make you feel good too.”

“Well, now that the edge is off, what if I give you a demonstration of all the things I like, then we’ll see where we go from there?”

And Alex wasn’t about to say no to that—not when Maggie’s fingers were skimming up her thighs once more, her body shuffling down the bed to rest in between Alex’s legs. Alex suspected she was in for a long night, and she’d never been happier about it.

\---

Alex thought it would get easier afterward, like the magnetic pull between her and Maggie would lessen or her heart would learn to slow down when the urgency of finally getting there with Maggie was out of the way.

Alex was wrong. Because before it had all been this ambiguous realm of possibilities. Sure, she’d let her imagination drift, and she’d done a bit of light research, but it hadn’t actually happened yet. But now…now she knew exactly what it felt like when Maggie’s fingers curled inside of her. Now she knew exactly how fast she fell over the edge when Maggie’s tongue flicked up the length of her. Now she knew exactly what Maggie sounded like when Alex reached out for those first few tentative touches, knew what Maggie felt like coming beneath her hands, knew what Maggie tasted liked when she let her legs fall open for Alex’s eager ministrations. And that more than anything left Alex feeling like she needed to have Maggie again and again and again—work and meals and responsibilities be damned.

“After Thursday,” Maggie had assured her that first morning when Alex was ready to call in sick from work after waking up to Maggie’s naked body curled around her own and Maggie’s lips pressing teasing kisses up and down her neck. “After Thursday we can take time off and spend as long as you want right here in this bed.”

“Promise? You, I mean, you want that too?”

Maggie had drawn Alex’s hand down between her legs then, letting her feel just how worked up she had gotten during their morning make-out session. “Is that enough to convince you?”

It was enough to convince Alex that they could be 15 minutes late to work.

Of course, with everything still to come on Thursday, even Alex wasn’t actually willing to stay home, so they dragged themselves over to the DEO, spending a few extra minutes making out in the parked car before Alex tugged Maggie inside for their morning briefing, tangling their hands together, unwilling to let go for even a second when she knew she would have to say goodbye and let Maggie go back over to the precinct soon enough.

J’onn avoided Alex and Maggie almost the entire half hour before the meeting, then sat on the opposite end of the table from them, shuffling out the moment he dismissed the rest of the agents. Before Alex could ask, Maggie chuckled. “Guess we were thinking a bit too loudly for him.”

Alex flushed a deep shade of red. “Oh my god. Do you think he—never mind. Don’t answer that.”

Biting her lip, Maggie shook her head. “I’ll see you after work, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

With one distinctly chaste kiss goodbye, Alex trudged back inside, grabbing Kara on her way down to the lab.

“Hey, what’s up?” Kara asked. 

“I have a question for you.”

Kara glanced down at her watch. “Is it urgent? Cat and I are supposed to go over some details about the big exposé.” After a long conversation with J’onn, they had decided that Supergirl—a pretense Alex insisted on maintaining, even though it made Kara roll her eyes—could let Cat Grant in on a few of the details in advance of Thursday, especially given that Cat already knew enough people who ran in social circles intersecting with Roulette’s to have technically been able to garner much of the information on her own. The idea was to have the story ready to go in the weekend issue of The Tribune—enough time to incorporate details from the report of NCPD’s sting operation and an interview with Supergirl, but not so much time that Roulette and Lillian would be able to start paying off reporters to shift the narrative in their direction.

“I just, um, Maggie slept over. Last night.”

“Oh? Like…?”

“Yeah.” Alex ducked her head down, trying to hide her grin with her hand. 

“Aww, look at you! Becoming the people that annoy your other neighbors.”

“Shut up,” Alex grumbled, but it held little malice. “But, um, do you think…can everyone tell?”

“You mean with the megawatt smile and the glowing and the way you’re pretty much floating and the hickies you didn’t quite cover up on your neck?”

“What?” Alex yelped, her hand flying to the side of her neck.

“Other side…”

“Right.” There was no need for Kara to know that there were definitely some better concealed ones on that side as well.

“So, uh, yeah, I think people can tell. You look like you’ve been shot by a love ray.” Alex’s mouth twisted to one side. “But it’s a good thing. You look happy.”

“Yeah, I, uh…I am, you know? I’m really, really happy.”

Kara’s mouth curled up into a smile, and she slung an arm around Alex’s shoulders, squeezing her and rubbing her hand along her upper arm. “And I’m so happy for you, even if I really, really don’t want more details than that.”

Alex squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Fair enough.”

“But I’m also really, really late,” Kara said as she pulled away, “and Cat hates it when people are late.”

“Cat hates most things.”

“And I’d rather not be one of them,” Kara yelled over her shoulder as she jogged to the launch pad, kicking off and up into the sky towards CatCo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll see you back here on Sunday for the last chapter! Thanks so much to everyone who's been following and commenting!


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And we're here! Heads up for an NSFW scene and canon-typical violence

Early on Thursday afternoon, J’onn convened a meeting for everyone involved with the sting operation, bringing in the NCPD officers to the sunny entry floor of their downtown base, which passed easily enough as an FBI office with its rows of cubicles and handful of offices along the perimeter for senior staff. Black metal file cabinets with shiny silver locks lined the walls, and a handful of personal artifacts littered each of the desks—#1 Dad mugs and dog of the month calendars and a printed out Dilbert cartoon or two tacked up on the walls. The DEO agents even suited up for the occasion, a few of them complaining about the heels or the stiff leather of unworn oxfords that they’d never had the opportunity or reason to break in.

Alex could have recited every line J’onn said right along with him during the meeting, so immersed as she was in the planning and preparation. She knew that assuming that the mission would be the key they needed to topple Roulette and begin unraveling Cadmus and bring back her dad would only leave her disappointed, but she couldn’t quite help the swell of hope she felt each time some new piece fell into place, and with Maggie, J’onn, and Kara by her side, it felt like they were finally doing something right.

That afternoon, J’onn sent the agents who would be working the mission home early, insisting that they eat a proper meal and try to center themselves before they showed up. Besides, with the vast majority of them going undercover, it wouldn’t do to arrive all at once in a row of black government SUVs.

Alex could barely stomach food, her gut churning with nervous anticipation, but she let Maggie order them pizza anyway, nibbling at a single slice until Maggie pushed her plate to the side and took Alex’s hands in her own. “You’ve got this. We’ve got this.”

“But what if…what if we’ve missed something?”

“Honestly? Maybe we have. But it’s too late now, and worrying about it is only gonna drive you mad.”

Rationally, Alex knew that. It was easy enough to internalize it for every other mission, to go in knowing they had prepared as best they could and that she and her team were trained for situations just like those ones, that they had years of experience that meant they didn’t need to know every detail in advance to succeed. But with her father in the balance and Lillian’s previous attempts against Kara’s life, her attempts to kidnap and recruit Alex…it all felt so much bigger, like some powder keg waiting for Alex to make one tiny slip before it all exploded.

“I can hear you thinking from across the table.”

“Sorry,” Alex muttered, rubbing at her forehead with her free hand.

“Don’t apologize. I just…how can I help?”

“No, no, sorry. This isn’t on you, and I don’t—I’m stressing out, and that’s making you stressed, which is the absolute last thing you need before something like this, and now I’m—”

“Alex.” Maggie’s tone was sharp, and Alex snapped her mouth closed, looking up into Maggie’s eyes. “I need you to breathe.” Alex did as she was told. “Tonight, you are going to be the badass agent I know you can be, and I’m gonna be right there with you, okay? Ride or die, Danvers. We’re in it together.”

Alex couldn’t quite put into words how much the idea of that meant to her, so she leaned forward instead, capturing Maggie’s lips in a heated kiss that she hoped would say the words she couldn't find. Soon Maggie’s hands were fisting in Alex’s shirt, their half-eaten pizza forgotten as Maggie surged forward, sucking Alex’s lower lip between her teeth.

They didn’t make it to the bedroom in their fumbling, settling for the couch instead. And Alex saw the unvoiced apology and the unasked question on Maggie’s lips, caught a glimmer in her eyes of the concern about doing something that wasn’t achingly sweet or romantic or any of the other things that the end of their first night together had been, but Alex didn’t want that then, thought it would probably drive her out of her mind if she tried to quash down the storm of emotions whirling inside her and funnel it into something gentle.

“I want this,” Alex insisted, pressing a hard kiss to Maggie’s lips. “This is still us.”

Maggie nodded, and suddenly Alex was on her back with a grinning Maggie poised above her. Her mind wandered back to all the thoughts she’d entertained about the idea of sparring with Maggie and being pinned by Maggie. She decided right then and there that this version—the one that ended with feverish kisses and her hands groping at Maggie’s ass and Maggie’s hands tugging her pants off—was far preferable to the one in the DEO gym.

Despite all of the buildup, Maggie still entered Alex slowly, still moved her fingers at a gentle pace that had been fine—amazing, even—two nights ago, their hips rocking together as they traded soft kisses after so many hours spent learning each other’s bodies and making one other come undone. But it wasn’t nearly enough this night.

“Harder,” Alex panted, her own hips bucking up to take what Maggie hadn’t yet given.

“Yeah?”

“Please.”

And Maggie still built Alex up to it, still paced herself and tempered her own passion until Alex was nearly begging, but it was enough to send Alex hurtling over the edge, her mind going blank for a few blissful moments as her world narrowed to her body and Maggie’s body and the space where they were still joined together.

“You good?” Maggie’s voice was soft, her fingers brushing Alex’s hair back, then trailing across the line of Alex’s jaw.

“Very. But is there, uh, anything I can do for you?”

“You don’t have to.”

But Alex swore she could see the tension coiling just beneath the surface, and she wanted to do for Maggie what Maggie did for her. “Let me take care of you.”

After a moment, Maggie nodded, letting Alex push her pants down to the ground, her boyshorts following shortly thereafter. And Alex still didn’t feel like she’d completely gotten a handle on all of the things, but outside of a few false starts, she had managed to get Maggie there with a bit of guidance almost every time. So she led Maggie back down to the couch and trailed hot kisses along her neck, focusing on the things she knew she could do and do well.

By the time Alex had made it down to Maggie’s chest, rucking her shirt and sports bra up without bothering to take them off, Maggie’s hips were thrusting upwards as she rutted against Alex’s thigh, leaving a slick streak of arousal in her wake as she tried to get the friction she so desperately needed.

“Please,” Maggie whimpered, dragging Alex’s hand down between her legs, and fuck if that didn’t do something to Alex.

Letting all her worries about not doing a good enough job slip away, Alex focused on Maggie, listening for the noises that meant she had done something right, feeling the way Maggie writhed under her, watching for the moment when Maggie’s hips canted up to meet her thrusts.

It was right after a half-gone Maggie had ordered Alex not to stop—not that she had any desire or plans to stop—that Alex’s phone rang, clear and loud in the otherwise quiet apartment. “I…” It was the ringtone so few people had, but surely they could wait a couple more minutes…

“Please,” Maggie whimpered again, fucking herself against Alex’s suddenly still fingers.

Shaking her head, Alex focused back in on Maggie, stopping again only when her phone began ringing for the third time in a row.

Maggie's arched back fell to the cushions, and she sighed as she reached up and pushed softly at Alex's chest, moving her further away. “Go get it. You’re worried.”

“Sorry,” Alex mumbled as she pulled herself up off the couch, rustling in her discarded pants until she found the offending phone shoved into one of the back pockets. “Hello? … Yeah, no, J’onn has it. … Kara, it’ll be fine. Cat can wait until morning. … No! … What? No, I just—you can come over once the event’s over tonight. … Kara, please. … Fine, yes, she’s here. And unless you want me to tell you exactly what your calls were interrupting, I need you to let me go. … Love you too. I’ll see you soon.”

Maggie tilted her head to the side once Alex dropped her phone to the ground. “Kara?”

“Yeah.”

“Urgent?”

“Only by Cat Grant’s standards.” Maggie chuckled. Alex scuffed at the floor with her foot, her hand coming up to rub at the back of her neck. “So, um, is the mood totally ruined?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily say  _ruined_ …”

“A little bit?”

“Maybe you kiss me and we find out?”

As it turned out, the mood was not ruined.

\---

“No sign of Lillian on the premises,” J’onn said over the comms, before clicking them off and hunching his shoulders forward to mimic the posture of the event security guard currently unconscious and handcuffed in the back of a DEO van.

“That’s good right?” Maggie asked Alex, squeezing Alex’s hand where it rested on the center console.

“It means I can go in without her recognizing me and figuring out what’s going on, but—”

“But you wanted to be able to tie her to this,” Maggie finished for her.

“I’m so fucking tired of her getting away with everything.”

“I get that. You know how many bad guys I used to have to let walk in Gotham?” Alex barely repressed a shudder; the stories of rampant corruption and vigilante justice from Gotham were legendary. She’d take their yearly near-apocalypse over Gotham’s daily horrors any day. “But even if we can’t implicate Lillian today, if we bring down Roulette, we cut off a big source of funding for her. Draw her out, little by little until she gets sloppy.”

“No, I know. You’re right.”

Maggie grinned up at Alex. “You know I love the sound of those two words.”

Alex merely rolled her eyes, muttering, “Don’t get used to it.” But then again, Maggie had been right again and again already—right about Alex’s sexuality, about some of the DEO’s less than ethical practices, about how sex didn’t need to be a one-and-done kind of deal. Alex shook her head. It wasn’t the time to think about that sort of thing. “Ready to go?”

Patting her purse stocked full of syringes, Maggie shot Alex a thumbs up. “Let’s do this.”

After a short drive over and an easy pass through J’onn’s security checkpoint, Alex and Maggie made their way inside, waving and smiling at a few of the people they recognized from the last event. Alex tried not to gag when Tom ambled over, winking and asking if their earlier offer still stood.

“You know, Tim, as it turns out, I’m really not into sharing.” Maggie’s arms encircled Alex’s waist, her chin tilting up to rest on Alex’s shoulder as she glared at the man.

He didn’t appear bothered, laughing it off before disappearing into the crowd.

“Such an entitled asshole.”

“True, but at least he was also dumb enough to give us some decent information last time.”

Maggie shrugged. “Speaking of…shall we?”

Alex took in a deep inhale, releasing it slowly to a count of five as she readied herself for the night ahead of them. “Let’s do it.”

The sound of clinking glasses and low music and rumbling voices echoed through the main arena, allowing Alex and Maggie to murmur back and forth without fear of being overheard when they spotted an alien or two being paraded around in shackles, a bored looking guard at their side. They were the new fighters mainly—not yet pumped so full of the drugs that they had to be caged, still optimistic enough to hope that they could use the fights as a chance to make easy money, their friends and families still trusting that they would be able to walk away from it at the end.

Spotting one of the aliens and his guards approaching, Alex dropped Maggie’s hand. “I promise I don’t mean anything I’m about to say, okay?”

Before Maggie could respond, Alex was sauntering across the floor to the alien who fought under the name Fang. He’d only been up once so far and had managed a last-minute victory, but not without sustaining a fair number of injuries that made him an easy first target.

“Wow,” Alex breathed out, her fingers trailing along the muscled forearm of the guard, whose head jerked up at the soft touch.

“Uh, what?”

“You must be so brave, dealing with these…beasts every day.” Alex fluttered her eyelashes, watching as Maggie slipped off to the side, looping back up and around the alien.

“This guy’s nothin’. You should see some of the big ones.”

“Really? I mean, they’re all so violent. Do you ever get scared?”

Puffing out his chest, the guard shook his head. “Just need to know what brings them down—that’s all.”

“Mm, smart and sexy,” Alex purred, leaning in close enough that her breath ghosted across his cheek as Maggie brushed up against the alien, obscuring the needle with her purse as she pushed down the plunger, injecting him with the antidote and the slow-acting sedative that should ensure the aliens were sleepy and docile by the time NCPD officers raided the building.

Fang snapped his jaw shut and let out a low growl at the pinch in the soft skin of his side, and Alex used it as an excuse to feign fright and jump back and away from the guard’s meandering hands.

“It’s alright, he won’t hurt you. Not when I’m here.”

“Well, I’m very lucky you’re here then, aren’t I?”

“If you want”—the guard ducked his head forward, his eyes looking to the left, then the right—“once I get through showing this brute around, I’ll take you to the back and show you some of the real fighters.”

Catching sight of the slight nod of Maggie’s head, Alex curled her mouth up into a close-lipped smile. “So long as you’ll be there to protect me.”

With a gruff noise and a single nod of his head, the guard yanked on the chain linked to Fang’s shackles. “Come on. I’ve gotta get you back.”

“You sure?” Alex whispered to Maggie the moment he was out of earshot. 

“It means only one of the two guards will be dealing with the uncaged aliens. The second the other one is out on the floor, I’ll duck back there and get the antidote into as many of them as I can.”

“And then we’ll just have the one or two still out on the floor to deal with once I can lose the caveman.”

Maggie managed to swallow the snicker of laughter that threatened to draw attention to them. “I’m gonna wait by the back, keep eyes on your caveman. When he brings Fang back, I’ll get to the others until the second guard comes by.”

“I’ll keep him distracted as long as I can. Oh, and, uh”—Alex leaned in closer, her voice lowering to barely a whisper—“tell Kara to be aware that she may have company.”

“Right, right. Good call.”

After one last squeeze of Alex’s hands for good luck, Maggie headed toward the back, keeping eyes on the guards. Meanwhile, Alex made her way toward her security suitor once more as he looped back around the room. She tried not to cringe when he held a hand out for her, instead letting herself be led to the back and making a point to take in as many details as she could while she was there, spinning around to let her body cam capture as much of the room as she could manage without contorting herself into odd angles.

“You ready?”

Alex nodded, fighting her instincts and not snapping his arm the moment his meaty hand curled around her lower back. As they strolled through the corridors, Alex focused on keeping track of exactly where they were in case she needed to escape in a hurry. She barely listened as he prattled on and on about how dangerous his job was, every so often humming or touching his biceps, which seemed to be enough to keep him satisfied. With every new cage to come into view, Alex felt her stomach turning, her nails leaving crescent-moon shaped indents in her palm as she balled her hands into fists to keep from yelling at him.

It was in the third and final room that a flurry of movement caught the guard’s attention. “Who’s there?” he barked.

“I didn’t see anything,” Alex lied, confident she knew exactly who it was.

“Could be one of those freaks trying to escape. Hold on.” He had his gun out and up before Alex could say anything. At the very least, it wasn’t like his bullets could do any harm to Supergirl, though as he neared the corner of the room where Alex was fairly certain Kara was crouched, Alex tip-toed closer, wanting to keep him from shooting and drawing attention to them before they were ready.

A hissed, “It’s Agent Cardile!” in Alex’s comms was enough to send her running forward and throwing an elbow into the guard’s solar plexus as Alex ripped the gun out of his hands, sending it skittering across the floor. A knee to the groin had him doubled over in pain, and a sharp shove down to the concrete floor, his head slamming against it with a sickening crack, knocked him out.

Cardile’s head popped out a moment later, and Alex could see his gun held aloft in steady hands. She made a mental note to give him a good word in his annual performance review for staying calm under pressure.

“He’s out,” Alex whispered. “Where’s Supergirl?”

“Here.” Kara fluttered down a moment later. “Winn had already unlocked a cage in the next room, so I had to deal with that before we had an escaped alien on our hands.”

Alex nodded in understanding. “How many are left?”

“These two.”

Alex glanced at the two cages. “We still leaving Draaga untreated?”

Kara chewed on her lower lip but finally dipped her head in acknowledgment. They all knew it was dangerous, but it was better to leave Draaga as vicious as Roulette knew he could be than to risk having Roulette suspect something and escape before NCPD could shut the whole operation down and bring her in.

“You take care of him then”—Alex gestured at the other cage, where an alien with a third eye in the middle of his forehead glowered at them—“and I’m gonna go check in on Maggie’s progress, see if I can’t help get through the last of them.”

Slipping back through the corridors, Alex tried to retrace her steps back to the room where they’d left Fang. There was a left, then down a few yards, then a right, and they should be…  _Thump_. The loud noise and the ensuing sound of heavy footfalls sent her scurrying around a corner. She stood stock-still, her heart hammering in her chest as she listened to the sounds growing closer and closer. She bent slightly to reach for her gun, but then the footsteps were passing, the noise gradually fading.

As Alex let out a shaky exhale, she felt something cold and hard wrap around her throat, tugging her back before she could even react. Her back hit up against something firm, the surface scaly-feeling, almost reptilian. She threw an elbow back, but it hit up against a solid-feeling body—definitely not human—and the pressure around her neck grew tighter. She gasped, trying to force some air into her lungs as her hands scrabbled at what she realized were definitely chains like the shackles she’d seen the aliens being led around in.

In a last ditch effort, Alex reached up and switched on her comms, managing a squeak from the back of her throat before her field of vision began narrowing, inky blackness closing in around her.

But then the chain was loosening, the alien behind her grunting in pain and a soft hand wrapping around Alex’s waist. “I’ve got you.”

Even a few feet away from an alien that had definitely been on the verge of killing her, Alex couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, you do.” But it wasn’t the time for sweet nothings, because the alien was desperately trying to loop her chain around Maggie’s neck then, fighting the only way she could with her hands and legs still shackled.

Alex acted quickly, yanking one of the syringes out of her purse and plunging it into the soft area of her lower belly before she could react. She whipped her gun out next, slamming the butt of it into her temple and watching as she crumpled to the floor.

“Are you okay?” Alex’s hands were all over Maggie’s upper body, inspecting the angry red scratches and the faint pink line that ran across her collarbone.

“Me? What about you?”

Alex shrugged off the concern. “Fine. Vision’s a little spotty still. Hurts to swallow, but it’s likely just a bad bruise. Nothing really.”

“Only you would call that nothing, Danvers.” But Maggie was smiling, and Alex felt the lingering chill from her brush with death slowly receding.

“I, uh, how’d you do? I mean, with other aliens?”

“Oh good. They’re all treated except the new one who’s supposed to go toe-to-toe with Draaga. I figure in case we can’t stop the fight quickly enough, it’d be better to give him a chance at survival.”

Having seen Draaga up close, Alex grimaced. “Good idea.” After a moment, her head jerked up. “How’d you know where to find me?”

“Heard you over the comms and figured maybe you’d found my missing alien.”

“More like he found me,” Alex grumbled. “Someone was coming—I had to duck in here.”

“Yeah. The other guard—he went back to the bathrooms before he had to go get Draaga.”

“Fuck. Kara.” Alex pressed down on her comms, hissing: “Guard on his way for Draaga. Move the other guard, and get out!”

Ramirez’s voice filtered over. “We’re already out. Supergirl’s going back for the body.”

Maggie arched her eyebrows in an unspoken question.

“Long story, but we had a bit of an issue back there. He’ll be fine. Probably got a nasty concussion, but fine.” It earned her an upward quirk of Maggie’s lips and a quick peck on the lips.

“We should probably get out there before the fight starts.

Alex gestured at Maggie’s chest and her arms. “It looks like you got clawed by a tiger.”

“Felt like I did too.” Before Alex could fuss about her, Maggie brushed off the concern. “We’ll deal with it afterwards. I’m okay, I promise.”

“Alright…” Alex remained unconvinced, though she told herself it would be okay for another hour. Then they could get back to the DEO and treat all the wounds, and she could give Maggie all of the care and attention she deserved. “We need to both get out of here before the fights start, though.”

Maggie gave a terse nod. “NCPD is already lined up. Once the fights start, we can bust the place. I mean”—Maggie tilted her head to the side—“we  _could_  bust them for operating without a liquor license now, but I figure it’s best to get proof of more wrongdoing than that.”

“Probably good to do that, yeah,” Alex teased.

Taking Maggie’s hand, Alex peered out into the hallway, glancing in both directions before tugging her down last leg of the corridor until they emerged into the back of the arena. She shuffled them towards the empty bathroom, using the opportunity to rinse out the nastier looking cuts on Maggie’s arms.

While Alex busied herself with tending to Maggie, Maggie radioed over the comms: “Back rooms complete. One alien separated and unconscious. May need medical attention when we return.”

“Got it,” Vasquez replied from her station out in the vans where she waited with three full teams of agents dressed in FBI jackets ready to join NCPD as backup and to gather all the aliens to bring back to the DEO until the antidote had run its course.

“Where’s Johnson?” a man’s loud voice boomed down the hallway. “He’s supposed to be getting things ready for the fight.”

“Who’s Johnson?” Maggie whispered.

“Do you think…is caveman Johnson?”

“Oh. Maybe.”

Alex radioed over the comms, keeping her voice low. “Supergirl? Supergirl, come in. Were you able to get the other guard moved?”

Kara’s voice came through, though it was broken up and garbled with static and what sounded like wind. Alex realized she was probably up in the air doing surveillance from overhead. “… moved him into a closet … were coming, so I … time for much.”

“Shit,” Alex cursed under her breath, clicking off her comms and rubbing her hands roughly across her face.

“Do you think…?”

“If they find him, they’ll realize something’s wrong?”

 Maggie considered it. “Roulette…she’s smart, but she’s not skittish. She relies on connections and money to get her out of most things.”

“Yeah…”

“She doesn’t know how deep this investigation’s gone.”

“Still.” Alex ran through a hundred different scenarios in her head, all of them somehow leading to Roulette and Lillian both slipping through their fingers again if she didn’t intervene. “Okay, you stay here. Man the comms and get NCPD ready. I’m gonna see if I can’t get the fights to start a little early.”

“Be safe.”

Alex’s lips curled up into a smile. “Always.” And then she was off, weaving her way into the crowds and slipping between groups of people, grumbling about a “waste of time,” and, “can’t believe they’re talking about calling off the fight,” and, “I paid good money for this.” until a ripple of agitation swept through the crowd.

On Alex’s trip back toward the bathroom, one of the men she vaguely recognized from last time—some lawyer type—turned to her. “Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Apparently they’re not going to make the aliens fight tonight! If they think they can drag us out to the middle of nowhere and get us to pay good money for drinks without putting on the show, they’ve got another thing coming.”

“What?” Alex squawked. “Oh, they are going to get a piece of my mind. I still haven’t gotten to see a proper fight.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t let the night end without one.”

“I mean…everything’s already set up. It can’t be that hard, can it?”

“No! You’re right. I’ll go find out what the delay is and put an end to it.”

Alex sent a simpering smile in his direction, waiting to slip back through the crowds until he had stormed off.

As Alex rounded the corner on the right-hand side of the platform, Roulette emerged, her walk slow and deliberate, as though the decision to begin nearly ten full minutes early was her own, not brought on by the anger and irritation of National City’s wealthiest.

“You didn’t think I’d bring you out here for nothing tonight, did you?” she drawled, her red dress swirling around her feet as she turned. “No, tonight we have a treat for you. Our own undefeated champion Draaga will be facing a scrappy newcomer—a Hellgrammite.”

As she said it, Alex spotted the other guard parading the Hellgrammite out from the back. The crowd whooped as he unhinged his jaw, hissing menacingly at all of the people gathered and only exciting them further.

Once the guard shoved him into the reinforced cage, Roulette announced Draaga, reading out his statistics as he lumbered forward and into the cage, hulking over the Hellgrammite.

“Fight’s beginning!” Alex whooped, holding down on her comms and hoping they got the message. She fought her way through the crowds then, edging closer and closer to the bathroom where Maggie was.

Within 30 seconds, the doors came crashing down. “NCPD, put your hands in the air!”

The crowd crashed together, colliding like supercharged atoms as they attempted to flee in any direction only to find themselves surrounded by what must have looked like the entire police department.

“Roulette’s on the move!” Alex yelled, spotting the woman in red ducking forward and pressing a lever that opened the door to the fighting platform with a hiss, releasing the enraged aliens out onto the floor. “Supergirl, we need you!”

“I’ve got Roulette,” Maggie called, and Alex spotted Maggie, gun held aloft, her heels left behind, and the slit in her dress torn higher to allow her greater mobility, charging out of the bathroom in pursuit of Roulette as she maneuvered towards the back corridors.

Alex turned around in time to see Draaga slamming Supergirl to the floor. She let out a low groan of pain, barely managing to roll over in time to avoid a crushing blow from his foot. “His leg!” Alex yelled into her comms.

Before Alex could try to help any more, a terrified scream bounced around the enclosed space. Out of her peripheral vision, she saw a woman hit the ground, a splatter of bright red blood staining the faces and suits of those around her.  _Fuck_. The Hellgrammite.

Alex whipped out her gun as she stalked forward. “Clear the way!” Just because they were terrible people didn’t mean she should shoot them. At least that’s what Maggie would tell her. And she was trying to be better about that kind of thing.

But the alien was fast, the bullets simply whizzing pass him and ricocheting off the hard exterior of the fighting ring as he began to morph shapes, his face contorting and his jaw unhinging. In an instant, he leapt through the air, landing in front of Alex and disarming her with a flick of his wrist that happened too fast for Alex to even see it, let alone react. As she lunged forward, he grabbed her, flinging her backwards into the cage.

The high-tech barrier sent a flash of pain through Alex, as if her skin was being electrified without the actual heat and current of electricity, and she felt herself crumble to the floor, her back and shoulders aching from the force of the impact.

“We’re all out here doing what we can to survive,” he taunted, a long spike-like protrusion glinting from the inside of his palm.

“That’s exactly what we’re doing,” Alex grunted, kicking her leg up with as much force as she could muster and slamming the pointed toe of her heels into his groin. The moment his eyes flickered shut in pain, Alex was up, twisting his arms behind his back and throwing him to the ground hard enough to buy herself at least a few seconds.

“I need containment, stat!” Alex yelled into the comms, dragging a vial of the antidote out of her bag and injecting it into his neck while she waited for backup.

A few moments later, two DEO agents in their FBI disguises jogged up with reinforced cuffs for his hands and ankles, then dragged him out to one of the waiting vans.

Alex drew in a ragged breath as she surveyed the room. NCPD officers barricaded each of the exits, citing all those in attendance and documenting who had been there. A disguised J’onn stood talking with the head of the NCPD Science Division, one of the few people who knew exactly who they had been working with from the start. Kara was flying a now-unconscious Draaga out of the warehouse. And Maggie was smirking as she forced Roulette forward, her hands cuffed behind her back, but her gait and expression still haughty. As Maggie walked closer, Alex heard her talking to Roulette, reciting her Miranda rights: “…one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?” A few of the DEO techs walked by with a couple of computers and phones in evidence bags, and dozens more escorted out the remaining aliens into the waiting vans, their feet stumbling as the sedatives kicked in.

“Nicely done, Agent Danvers.” Alex looked up to find J’onn smiling at her. “Tonight was more than we let ourselves hope for, and it’s all thanks to your hard work.”

“And Maggie’s.”

J’onn dipped his head, clapping a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Of course. And she might not know it yet, but I think you might want to start planning a celebration for a certain Lieutenant Maggie Sawyer, Co-Captain of the NCPD Science Division.”

“Wait. Really?”

J’onn merely shrugged, but Alex could see the slightest of upturns around the corners of his mouth.

\---

“Coffee?”

Alex turned around, finding Maggie standing in the doorway out to the balcony, two mugs of coffee clutched in her hands, her hair still tousled from sleep.

“Please.”

Maggie handed one of the mugs to Alex as she stepped forward, leaning onto the railing and looking out over the city skyline, the sun slowly creeping higher and higher. “You know you could’ve woken me up.”

“You looked so peaceful, though.”

“Didn’t stop you from waking me on Sunday morning,” Maggie teased, bumping Alex’s arm with her own.

Alex’s cheeks flushed a light shade of pink. “That was for a…different reason.”

“Hey, you won’t hear me whining about that particular kind of wake up call…even if it did end up earning us our first note as a couple.”

Squeezing her eyes shut, Alex buried her head in the hand not clutching her coffee mug like a lifeline. “Please don’t remind me.”

“At least he didn’t knock the way  _someone_  did.” Alex could feel the weight of Maggie’s glare and made every effort to avoid it until Maggie forced her face in front of Alex’s. “Isn’t that right?”

“I said I was sorry!”

“I know, I know. I’m just teasing you.”

“Besides, that was every night. Sunday was one of the few times we’ve, you know…”

“Done it up against the living room wall?”

Alex could barely repress the shudder that ran through her body at the memory. “Um, yeah.”

“Would it make you feel better if we earned ourselves another noise complaint this morning?”

Even as a smile tugged up the corners of Alex’s mouth, she shook her head. “No, I’m just a little worried, that’s all.”

Maggie nodded, sipping at her coffee. The unspoken worries hung heavy in the air around them. Roulette’s trial scheduled for that afternoon. The testimony they would both have to give up on the stand. The release of the final few fighters who had been on the drug for the longest length of time and had required additional doses of the antidote and enough nights with medical care to sweat out the lingering effects of withdrawal. The anticipation as everyone at the DEO waited for the actual FBI to process all the evidence they had handed over about Lillian Luthor and decide if they wanted to pursue the case and if they had enough evidence to get a judge to issue a warrant.

“We did things by the book, Alex. We’ve practiced our testimony. We have legally obtained video and audio footage. We’ve got aliens from the rings ready to testify, plus plenty of agents.”

“I know, but I…what if I fuck it up?”

“You won’t.”

“Maggie, you and I are the key human witnesses, and I’ve never had to testify before!” A part of her longed for the days back when her work got to be put under a little less public scrutiny. She knew J’onn had testified in private hearings, as well as to Senate and military committees, but this seemed different. Bigger. Like the safety of aliens in National City was riding on her knowing exactly what words to say and smiling at the right times and convincing the jury that she was more trustworthy than the other side.

“Alex.” Maggie’s voice was firm as she guided Alex around to look at her. “I get it. I was terrified before my first time up on the stand, and it was for a freakin’ contested speeding ticket.” Alex’s lips twitched. “But you know what you’re talking about, and that’s what matters most of all. Let them see even a fraction of the amount of passion I’ve see when you talk about this case, and the jury will be on your side in a minute.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” After a minute, Maggie shrugged. “And either way, I get to see you in that fancy suit, and you get to see me in my dress uniform, and doesn’t that make up for the stress?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Oh, come on…what if I keep the tie on for you tonight.”

“Maybe a little more than a little.”

“Give me time, Danvers. Bet I can change your mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who followed along with this story! I've so appreciated your comments and encouragement along the way.
> 
> For those of you following 2020, the last chapter of that one will be going up this Tuesday. I may be a little MIA while I try to finish packing before the big move, but I've already got a few chapters for a future AU drafted, so I promise I won't be gone for long ;)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr @sapphicscholarwrites and Twitter @sapphicscholar 
> 
> I love hearing what you think, so if you wanna drop a line in the comments or chat on Twitter/Tumblr, I'm around!


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